Joie de vivre, or joy of living, is one of those wonderful French expressions that we’ve co-opted into our English language because, even if you don’t parlez Français, you’ll immediately understand the mood it evokes, and there’s really no way to express it so concisely and eloquently in our mother tongue.

Special individuals like Conley so embody this way of being, this exuberant living of life, that their spirit is infectious. His parents say that he was this way – outgoing, intelligent, involved, and even entrepreneurial – from a young age.

“We used to live on a street called Burlinghall,” his father Steve Conley explains. “And by the time he was in junior high school, he was running the ‘Burlinghall Olympics’. All the kids in the neighborhood came to participate in the Burlinghall Olympics. He wrote a newspaper for the community. It was a kid writing things for other kids in the community.”

Chip’s mother Fran continues, “He’d go out and interview people on the block that he didn’t know; he’d just go to the door and say, ‘I’m writing for this street newspaper, The Burlinghall Times.’”

That ease in talking to people and curiosity about them has helped Chip Conley grow into a person that other people just want to be around. “He is a unique human being,” Fran says admiringly. “He just draws people as friends. There is this enormous group of people, some of whom go back 25 years and some that are kind of new. They all group together and go places and he’s kind of the Pied Piper that gets them there and they all have this wonderful time. It’s just his nature — he’s not trying.”

Bringing together people and experiences came so naturally to Chip, that, though he had no set plans to, he made a career for himself doing just that, as Founder and CEO of California’s largest boutique hotel group, fittingly called Joie de Vivre.

“I didn’t necessarily know I was going to be in the boutique hotel business, but I did know that I wanted to do something I was going to be passionate about. And hence the name Joie de Vivre. It’s not a particularly practical name for a company, it’s hard to pronounce, hard to spell, a lot of people don’t know what it means, but it defines my mission in life and our company’s mission, and that’s to celebrate the joy of life.”

This career path was not one that Conley navigated; rather, it was one he created from the beginning — blazing a trail of unique properties, each with its own distinct personality. Joie de Vivre hotels and Chip Conley are known in the industry for not having a cookie-cutter style, and for their unique approach to determining the flavor of each location, which ends up offering more to guests than just a place to lay their heads.

Chip explains, “Each hotel has a magazine and five adjectives that describe it. We do it in the design and concept, starting from the name of the hotel — everything comes back to those five adjectives.”

Take, for instance, the Phoenix Hotel, also known as San Francisco’s “Rock and Roll Hotel”. It was a seedy 1950s motel when Conley started his Joie de Vivre ventures with the property, and it has become the SF favorite of rockers from the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Psychedelic Furs to Pearl Jam, The Killers, Bloc Party and The Shins. It is directly influenced by Rolling Stone Magazine, and its five adjectives are: funky, irreverent, adventurous, cool and young-at-heart.

Another San Francisco-based Joie de Vivre property is the Hotel Vitale, whose magazine influence is characterized as “Real Simplemeets- Dwell”, and the five keywords are: modern, urbane, fresh, natural and nurturing.

To help visitors choose the hotel that will resonate the most and suit them the best, Joie de Vivre’s web site has a fun hotel matchmaker quiz, which asks questions like “What kind of people do you most connect with? fun-loving/energetic, serene/soulful, charming, urbane, adventurous/active, gentle/quiet, professional/tailored”. This is no gimmick — and it took someone who kind of didn’t know what he was doing when he started out in the hotel business to figure out how to give people what they want.

“Twenty two years ago when I started the company when I was 26 years old, I didn’t have any hotel experience. I didn’t know what the heck I was doing, and in many ways I was breaking the rules — I was this rebel,” Chip says. “One of the things I started saying rebelliously 15 years ago was this idea of psychographics versus demographics. And I said it partly because people kept asking me, ‘Who’s your demographic, your customer?’ But that question didn’t work for me, because in the same hotel you can have a 25-year-old and a 65-yearold, both who love the hotel. We’re attracting people to it not because of their age or their skin or their gender, but actually for a variety of other qualities.”

The example is again the Phoenix Hotel — a hotel in a “bad neighborhood” in San Francisco. Conley found that often, the people who were showing up didn’t fit the typical demographic of who one would think, would be there — the typical demographic of this “rock and roll” hotel, he says, was a “25-year-old male rock and roll musician from L.A. with tattoos”.

“But,” he continues, “Dr. Timothy Leary, famous Harvard hippie, in his later years when he was in his 70s before he passed away, was a regular at the Phoenix. He was somebody who would stay in the hotel quite a bit. And what it actually taught me is that we are very familiar with the phrase ‘You are what you eat’, well, in my business you are where you sleep. Not, you are who you sleep with, but you are where you sleep. And what I mean by that is this identity refreshment. The idea that Timothy Leary loved the Phoenix because it was Rolling Stone magazine and it was funky, irreverent, adventurous, cool and young-at-heart, and for him, that was a refreshment of how he saw himself.”

Everything the company does in that hotel comes back to those five words — a powerful reminder of the direction they chose to take with the property, and a way to remain true to it.

Conley’s own five adjectives, though they change slightly depending on his mood and circumstances, also help him to define himself and his approach, and stay on track with it. To best describe himself, he has chosen eclectic, curious, creative, responsive, and competitive.

The people closest to Chip Conley might choose a few other words too. His foster-son, Damien would probably unironically use the word, “savior”, says Chip’s mother, Fran. “I don’t know how old Damien was, I’m thinking 10 or 11, he was not a really tiny child. He had parents who were deficient in lots of ways and were not there for him. He was practically living on the street, and Chip found him,” she explains.

“He spied Damien as being a kid, he said, with a conscience. And so Damien was headed either probably to jail or death. I mean, he was hot wiring cars and he was living on the streets and didn’t know better. So Chip kind of took him on as a project, and he couldn’t officially foster him for some reason, but unofficially he virtually raised him, and saw that he got his homework done, and was in school, and so Damien is for all intents and purposes, his boy.”

Steve adds, “And in fact, when he was interviewed for the Stanford Review article they did on Chip, he said if it weren’t for Chip I’d be dead now.” Damien has gone on to have his own family — three children — and a successful career as a male nurse working with elderly people.

Donald Graves would probably choose yet another adjective in describing his partner of eight years: supportive. Both have pursued their careers (Donald, a doctor, and Chip with JDV and his other projects) while maintaining a loving relationship and experiencing travel and adventures together.

Chip’s proud parents would probably have a challenge stopping the list at just five words, but some of the descriptive adjectives his father Steve used when talking about him sum up their thoughts well: bright, driven, leader. Fran continues, “I echo your last one, but more than just a leader, I don’t know of a person who isn’t crazy about him. When we go up to the hotel openings, it’s like being the parents of a rock star. I will get in an elevator with people going up and down to different floors at one of these new hotel openings, and somebody will remark that that’s Chip’s mother and they’ll all look around and say, ‘You’re Chip’s mother?!’ It’s quite an extraordinary thing to see how universally admired he is.”

Admired, and respected as well. As if owning and/or managing almost 40 properties wasn’t enough to keep him busy, Chip has also found the time to author three books — The Rebel Rules: Daring to be Yourself in Business, Marketing That Matters: 10 Practices to Profit Your Business and Change the World, and the newest: Peak: How Great Companies Get Their Mojo from Maslow. Comments printed on the back of the book from impressive entrepreneurs and business leaders show tremendous respect for Chip’s theory and thinking on the ways to apply psychologist Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to current-day business.

“Chip Conley gives a brilliant analysis of the absolute necessity of Maslow’s hierarchical paradigm in unleashing the talents and commitment of customers, employees, owners — in fact, stakeholders. Great resource material for leaders, trainers, educators, even parents. Chip practices in hotels what he teaches — most successfully!” Stephen R. Covey, author, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and The 8th Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness.”

Out of this most recent book has come the PEAK Seminar Series, and Chip is also a popular public speaker for audiences numbering from 10 to 20,000. He’d like to continue on this path of entrepreneur/ author/speaker into the future.

“On a personal level I’m going to keep writing more and more books, and keep speaking. I just want to continue to be a provocateur, somebody who actually provokes interesting thoughts in people. I like people to say, ‘I hadn’t thought of it that way.’”

Conley has lived in San Francisco for 25 years now — moving there to do his undergrad at Stanford, and never coming back to Long Beach. Well, that’s not exactly true, because he has returned on a regular basis to spend time with his parents. His newest Joie de Vivre property, Hotel Maya, opens on July 1, right here in our fair city.

The former Coast Long Beach Hotel has undergone a $20 million renovation to be transformed into the 11-acre Hotel Maya, and the stunning result is being called Long Beach’s most exotic boutique hotel. (Its inspirations were Fast Company-meets-Coastal Living, and: creative, active, relaxed, escapist and connected.) A lively restaurant called Fuego features an expansive outdoor patio with views of the adjacent marina and downtown Long Beach, plus a 20-seat lounge.

The pride of Long Beach, Chip Conley, couldn’t be more excited about this newest addition to Joie de Vivre, as his passion for this city goes back to his roots. “I have such pride in Poly High School, I absolutely love that high school — I loved it while I was there, I love what it stands for today. This very culturally diverse school environment certainly affected my level of empathy, my level of understanding ‘the other’ — it made me feel comfortable with what ‘the other’ means. The idea of the empathy behind the person who is the minority and the other, and that that’s not from a point of weakness, that could be a point of strength. To have some level of comfort — just being comfortable in my own skin as a diverse person myself.”

You can find out more about Chip and his work at chipconley.com, and joiedevivre.com.