Who Owns Freehand Hotels?

Andrew Zobler's Sydell Group opened the first Freehand in Miami Beach in 2012 inside the art deco Indian Creek Hotel, pairing shared rooms with design by Roman and Williams and the Broken Shaker cocktail bar run by the Bar Lab team. The formula, boutique hotel quality at hostel-adjacent prices, won immediate attention and the bar collected national awards.

The brand expanded to Chicago in 2015 inside a 1927 River North building, then to Downtown Los Angeles in the Commercial Exchange building, and to New York in 2018 in the former George Washington Hotel on Lexington Avenue, which had earlier housed the first Freehand-era experiments in hybrid lodging.

Queensgate Investments' October 2019 acquisition for roughly $400 million moved Freehand under the same roof as Generator, creating a combined lifestyle platform of 19 hotels across 17 cities. The properties held up through the pandemic and continued operating under Generator's management.

Under Brookfield ownership since May 2025, Freehand continues as the group's US boutique brand while Generator executes a portfolio-doubling plan that could eventually extend the Freehand name beyond its four-city base.