What began as a wedding in Buenos Aires became a hotel built around the things Patricia O’Shea loved most: friendship, pleasure, beauty, and the feeling of coming home.
The year 2002 was close enough to remember, and far enough away to feel like another world.
There was hardly a personal digital life to maintain, no group chat to coordinate, no phone in your hand documenting the night, event, or vacation as it played out in real time. People traveled to see each other, both locally and otherwise. They made plans, showed up, stayed late. And when the weekend was over, they went home with the memories.
For Patricia O’Shea, the year was certainly full enough.
She had been living in Ireland for a number of years, having moved there from Buenos Aires, where she was born and raised, to work in public relations for boutique hotels around the world. There she met Tom, a British music producer who was recording an album in Dublin. They fell in love, and a few years later, they were engaged and planning their wedding.
They decided to get married in Buenos Aires.
The timing was fortuitous. Argentina had just come through its economic crisis, making a wedding there considerably less expensive than one in the United Kingdom. More importantly, it gave their friends and family from Ireland, Britain, the United States and Australia a reason to come to Patricia’s city and experience it with them.
There was only one problem.
The older generation had plenty of options for places to stay. Buenos Aires certainly had its five-star hotels. But their friends — many of them from fashion and music — were looking for something else that perhaps a traditional hotel at that time couldn’t offer.
They wanted spaces to nurture the “good feelings” that come with a close friend’s wedding — a good bar and cocktails, a pool to unwind, a spa to recharge, and somewhere beautiful to spend time together. They also wanted the feeling of being on holiday without paying $600 a night for it.
Patricia looked around and realized the place they were looking for didn’t really exist.
So, while planning her own wedding, and almost without meaning to, she began to imagine what the place might look like. By the time she had returned from their honeymoon, the vision had become a business plan.
She Knew What She Liked
Before there was Home, there was Patricia.
By the time she and Tom met, she had already experienced more than one world: Buenos Aires, Ireland, the hotel industry, and years of traveling for work and pleasure. She had developed a particular eye for the spaces she wanted to spend time in — interiors that felt warm rather than clinical, modernist architecture, glass, wallpaper, objects with a history, rooms filled with light.
She also knew what she missed.
“I missed the sky of Argentina”, she says.
When Patricia and Tom found the old furniture warehouse that would eventually become Home, one of the first things she noticed was what wasn’t there: buildings blocking the natural light, people looking into the pool, a feeling of being closed in.
She needed somewhere you could move freely in and out. Somewhere you could relax in a bikini and feel completely at ease that no one was watching.
The space had to have the right light. The right sense of privacy. A body of water. An interior that allowed for flow, movement and intimacy. And eventually, the other things Patricia had come to consider essential: places to gather, to converse, and hospitality that felt personal.
Tom brought his own instincts to the project. A music producer by profession, he also possessed a strong sense of space, structure and design. Between them, there was already a shared understanding of what made a place feel right — even if neither had ever built a hotel before.
Patricia also had additional insight: she knew the people she was building it for.
The friends coming to Buenos Aires for their wedding were not looking for a formal hotel experience. They wanted somewhere to relax, drink, swim, meet people and spend time together. Patricia understood that because, in many ways, she wanted the same thing.
She wasn’t particularly interested in what a hotel was supposed to look like. She simply knew what she liked, what felt good, and trusted that there would be other people out there who might agree.
Trusting Instinct
The hotel materialized almost by accumulation.
Tom’s music career was changing. The internet and Napster had disrupted the business, and the couple began to consider whether Argentina might become home. Friends who had come to the wedding were willing to invest in the development of Home Hotel.
The search for a building began. They had found the structure, initially a warehouse, but turning it into a hotel was another matter entirely. There was no finished vision waiting to be executed. They were figuring it out as they went.
The newlyweds drove around looking for furniture and objects. They found items in obscure warehouses, bought what they liked and had pieces repaired. They collected wallpaper simply because they loved it, before wallpaper had become fashionable again. One thing led to another and the vision slowly came to be.
Patricia describes the process as a journey of discovery. “We just bought them because we liked them.”
Rather than trying to reproduce a hotel they had seen somewhere else, they were paying attention to what caught their eye, what felt right in the space, what they wanted to live with, and what their eventual guests would enjoy.
At one point, they discovered century-old European pine hidden between the floor and ceiling of the building. Patricia explained that the wood had arrived from Europe on ships traveling between the two continents, part of the complicated movement of goods between Argentina and Europe at the time. Once uncovered, they found a way to give it another life within the hotel.
Home hotel began to take shape through these discoveries: a piece of furniture here, a wallpaper there, a material with a history, a room that called for more unusual details.
There was instinct, certainly. But there was also a willingness to stay curious and keep looking, collecting, and refining the search for all the right elements.
That combination would become one of Home’s defining qualities.
Patricia had no reason to know, in 2002, that the things she and Tom were choosing would still feel relevant twenty years later. She only knew that they meant something and trusted that they served a real human purpose without necessarily needing to explicitly articulate the idea.
And, for the moment, that was enough.
The Things That Matter
By the time Home opens, Patricia’s vision is established.
The things she had wanted for her friends in 2002 have become the foundations of the hotel itself. Somewhere to sleep, but also somewhere you could settle into — where a drink might turn into a conversation, a few days might turn into a friendship, and a hotel might begin to feel a little like somewhere you belong.
“I’m big into energy,” she says.
The spirit of a place matters to her as much as the furniture in it, and Home is designed around the idea that you might actually want to stay awhile. There is no particular pressure to move through the hotel. You are allowed to settle into it.
The design is part of that feeling, but it isn’t the whole thing.
Patricia has always been interested in what happens around a place: what people discover there, who they meet, what they end up talking about, what makes them want to return.
Her Home Guide is a good example. Rather than offering the usual list of Buenos Aires attractions, it presents the city from Patricia and Tom’s point of view — the restaurants, shops, streets and places they actually like, along with the stories and details they think are worth knowing.
The same instinct extends to the people who stay at Home.
Patricia talks about reading her guests: paying attention to who they are, what they might want, and how to make their time there feel personal. It is less about delivering a prescribed version of hospitality than noticing who is in front of you and responding to that.
And then there are the things no one could have planned.
The people who met at Home. The couples who came together. The friendships that began around the pool. The guests who still write to Patricia twenty years later, sending photographs and memories from a stay that might have happened decades ago.
“For them to feel like they can still reach out to you — that’s not really something that happens.”
These are the parts of the hotel that don’t appear on a floor plan but convey a way of life.
Patricia created a place around the things she herself values — beauty, pleasure, friendship, conversation, warmth, a little glamour — and over time, other people began making their own memories inside it.
Twenty Years Later
The world that Home opened into in 2005 looks very different from the one it operates in now.
Travel, and the motivations behind it, have changed. Phones and social media have changed what people think they are supposed to get from a vacation.
Patricia, like many of us, wonders whether people are still traveling to genuinely experience places and people, or to simply use locations as an aesthetic backdrop for trending travel content.
She believes people may eventually want to make memories again, rather than memories that exist mainly on their phones.
It’s a change she hopes to facilitate herself through Home.
You can tell by the fact that Home still prints its guide and that Patricia still writes it herself. That there isn’t a chat bot answering guests. That every message still gets a human response.
The place still feels unusually personal and detail-oriented. Besides the memorable design details, the distinctive team and hospitality behind Home overwhelmingly contribute to its atmosphere of warmth, comfort and familiarity.
Whether it’s a warm welcome from the front desk any time of day, a charming conversation with the bartenders before you head out into Palermo, or a member of staff stopping by your morning breakfast table to ask about your stay.
That may be part of why it has lasted.
Patricia has been offered the chance to build Home elsewhere but she hasn’t quite been able to bring herself to do so.
“It is a project that is so personal. It’s life. You need that passion to drive you.”
Twenty years after the wedding that started the whole thing, she still seems to make decisions in much the same way she did then.
She follows her instinct. She nurtures relationships. She notices when something feels right.
Maybe that is what has allowed Home to age so well. It was never built around a moment, a trend or a particular idea of what a hotel should be. It was built around a handful of things Patricia genuinely wanted in her own life.
Home went on to appear in Wallpaper, Condé Nast Traveler, Forbes, Vogue and Architectural Digest, among many others, as Palermo itself continued its exponential growth around it.
As significant as those milestones are, the more convincing evidence is sitting around the pool.
It is in the people who still send Patricia photographs twenty years later. In the couples who met there. In the friendships that began over a drink. In the guests who remember a particular room, a particular night, a particular feeling they had while they were there.
A hotel can be beautiful and still be forgettable. Home was built by someone who understood that the things people remember are usually much simpler.
A good conversation. A swim before dinner. Being excited to return to your hotel at the end of the day.
And the feeling, for a few days, that you had somewhere you wanted to stay.
You can visit the Home Hotel website here.
RELATED POSTS:
HOW TO MASTER THE SOLO DATE ANYWHERE IN THE WORLD – Minimal Instinct
A CASE FOR QUICK TRIPS OVER EXTENDED VACATIONS – Minimal Instinct