Stay Bar Harbor: Stephen Coston

Lisa Belisle: So I love the fact that you grew up in Bar Harbor and you saw that there was an opportunity and you said, I think I'd like to try to raise the bar a little bit and do things a little bit differently with regard to hospitality.

Stephen Coston: Oh, that's pretty much exactly what happened. It was kind of an accident at first. I went to school for finance, which obviously there's a lot of finance involved in any type of business you do. But I went for like financial management, to be an investment analyst or something along those lines, which I did get into, and I still do it, but the lodging stuff kind of dominates the situation at this point. And like I said, that was kind of an accident. My grandfather owned a motel for a long time. I worked there. I always liked it, but I didn't necessarily think I was gonna do what I ended up doing. It wasn't like a plan. And that motel got sold to a big hotel company and I just kept working there. And I saw the ways they did it different, but also some of the ways that I thought the old way was better. And I was kind of thinking about like, well, that's interesting. He does this this way, but we did it this way. But I think we were wrong in this case. And then I started having my own ideas as I was working there about like, oh, well, neither one of them did this, but you could try this. And a realtor came to me and was like, hey, this 12 room motel's available. It was in pretty tough shape. It was built in the seventies. And he was like, it's available. You want to give it a try? And I tried to talk my aunt into it and she didn't end up doing it. And so I harangued my mom into doing it. And so I thought she was gonna primarily be running it and I was just gonna kind of help support the financial side of it. But I ended up being more involved in it than I anticipated, and I liked it more than I anticipated, and it did better than I anticipated and I got really interested in it. So like 11 properties later or something like that, here we are.

Lisa Belisle: So what was the first property that you bought?

Stephen Coston: Well, its legacy name is the Rockhurst Motel. Everybody in Bar Harbor will kind of chuckle because it was kind of known as just not a particularly attractive motel. It kind of looked like a trailer almost. It was like L-shaped, modular looking thing. And it had a really funny horse and carriage motif on the side. And then Witham Hotels, which is the company that bought my grandfather's motel, ironically bought it, changed it to the Aurora Motel, and then they sold it to me. So I worked for them and they sold it to me.

Lisa Belisle: And you've also bought the Bar Harbor Manor, which is a pretty significantly different other end of the spectrum.

Stephen Coston: We've got the whole thing covered. We have everything from, I have a nine room bed and breakfast that I own myself. I have two adjacent bed and breakfasts totaling 23 rooms that I own with four other people. I've got a 56 unit economy style motel that I own with another guy. It's all sorts of different properties, ownership structure, it's all over the place. We've got the whole spectrum.

Lisa Belisle: Yes. I think I saw one of your hotels, the Anchorage. I believe I stayed there a million years ago.

Stephen Coston: Yes. It's been there a million years. So that's probably about right.

Lisa Belisle: And you wouldn't necessarily know it was there. It was pretty unassuming.

Stephen Coston: That's the 56 room one I was talking about. We bought that, me and a guy, the guy who built one of my properties, he's a contractor. We bought it together and we actually bought it in April and opened it in May and we completely renovated it in a month. I still don't know how that happened. And when I say completely renovate, I don't mean paint it and put in new accent pillows. We ripped the carpet out, we ripped the walls down. We took the toilets out, we redid some of the bathtubs. We put in some new ceiling tiles. We painted it. We bought it I think exactly a month before Memorial Day weekend. And we opened and were full on Memorial Day weekend. I don't know.

Lisa Belisle: Well that's impressive cuz I stayed there when I was a college student, and I would describe it as modest when I stayed there.

Stephen Coston: Yes it still is. I mean, like I said, we kind of have something for everybody. So within the group this summer there will be 10 properties operating, and then we're building one right now. So there will be 11 by sometime later this year or early next year. But between those 10 properties, they couldn't be more different. But that's by design, because different people have different needs. Some people don't care about a fancy breakfast and they don't care about fancy furnishings and fixtures. They just want it to be clean, comfortable. And even at the Anchorage, when we redesigned it we were thoughtful about, it all looks good. I'm not knocking the place. It just, it's not the same as like Sandbar Cottage, which is full of gorgeous artwork and antique furniture and just stuff that you're not gonna be able to provide in a motel where you want to try to help people out on the price point because you can't make those kind of investments and then not charge anything for it. So we have something, and our staff is really good about trying to help the person. Some people will call one of the bed and breakfasts and they'll be like, well, I have a family. And I want to say, thank you for calling, but if you're willing to just trust me, this is not the property, this doesn't meet any of the criteria you're looking for, but we have one that does. And usually they really appreciate that and they're like, oh yes, actually this is much better. Thank you.

Lisa Belisle: So you brought up something that I wanna make sure that we talk about because it's really why we were interested in having you here. And that is that you really have done a wonderful job bringing Maine art, or Maine connected art in some cases, into the properties. But you've also said in some of the things that I've read about you, that you're not claiming to be someone with an expertise in art, architecture, design.

Stephen Coston: No, I have zero formal training beyond some high school art classes. I have zero formal training in art or design or architecture. It's all just come about naturally, I guess.

Lisa Belisle: So why was this important to you?

Stephen Coston: Well, after we did the little 12 room motel that I mentioned, we redeveloped that property. I thought it was gonna take probably 10 years, but like I said, it did a lot better than we anticipated. So we ended up doing it. We bought it in 2015 and after the first season we immediately started working on getting the permits and stuff. And it took two years to get the permits, but we did it in 2018. And I don't know why, this sounds goofy in retrospect, but at the time I never even thought of hiring a designer. I just had some ideas about what I thought it should look like. And like I said, my mom was involved in that one. She had some ideas and some of our friends had some ideas. And I just started going on Google and looking at ideas, inspiration, paint, colors, carpets. And we decided to go with a nautical motif in that one. We never hired any designer consultant, nothing. We did have an architect on that project, but that was the last time that we've employed an architect. The building that we're building right now on Cottage Street, one of my business partners actually made a scale whiteboard model of the footprint of each floor. And I drew what I thought the place should look like, layout wise, on a whiteboard. And we had a draftsman clean it up, professionalize it, and we designed the outside, where the windows were and stuff, to meet the needs. And if you look at the whiteboard model, there's almost no changes to what it turned out to be. Because once you've done it once, the hallway width is the hallway width, an elevator is an elevator, a staircase is a staircase. Egress is egress. And again, I'm not an expert. So there are some things I still need that draftsman to go in there and clean up. But I know how thick a wall is. And it works because you know what didn't work, things you would've done different because you did it. So it just never really occurred to me that the information was all just kind of available, and it never occurred to me to hire people. I was like, in business, I thought I was supposed to do it myself.

Lisa Belisle: Well, it seems like it's worked. So at the end of the day it seems like, you know.

Stephen Coston: The first project I did by myself was Primrose Inn. I bought it in 2019 and opened it in 2020. That was fun. But that one, when I look back at it, I worked with Ethan Allen on that one. They provided the furniture and I didn't even know this when I called them, I thought I was just gonna order some beds and stuff. But they're like, no, we come, we measure, we do. So I did collaborate with them on that one. I already mostly had it locked in because I thought I was just ordering a bed. So it was more like they came in and they made some really helpful tweaks and they helped me fill in the blanks. And I really enjoyed that project and I think I learned a lot from that project. And then I worked with them again on my next project. And I feel like doing those two projects with that connection helped me learn a lot of things and do some of the other projects completely by myself and have them come out up to standard.

Lisa Belisle: So knowing this and knowing that you were working with a specific budget, you could have chosen to just do some sort of generic stock photos on your walls, but clearly you didn't, you really invested in some, and it's wonderful art and art connected from Maine.

Stephen Coston: It gets more and more every time I do one, honestly. So on Mount Desert was the first time I ever had any experience buying any art. And there was a woman who does watercolors. Her name's Beth Whitney. I can't remember where in Maine she lives, but she paints watercolors and she offers prints. And like I said, I found it on Google. And I felt like it was reasonable and she was willing to meet the timeframe and provide the prints. And then I framed them myself. She gave me advice on how to, and a woman at a local frame shop actually helped me a lot. I went in there and I was like, hey, can I frame these? And she's like, well, it's gonna cost you a fortune if I do this for you, it's like a hundred whatever. But let me tell you where you can order them and you need this and this kind of tape. And I've used her store to frame tons of stuff since then. But that was my first experience with it. And again, I just found it on Google. And then when I did Primrose, I went over to Artemis Gallery in Northeast Harbor and I was like, hey, can we either work together where you display the art in my place, or I just work with you to source art. And so I ended up going the direction to just buying the art. I always buy the art. And that was the first experience I had with a local gallery. And I have tons of stuff from Artemis. And then I met the woman who owns Gallery at Somes Sound, Tierra. And we became friends. And I have a lot of paintings I've gotten through her too. And then I met Emma at Portland Art Gallery because I was on Instagram and I saw a painting that she had and I just messaged her. I was like, can you send that to Bar Harbor? Thanks. So it just kind of happened over time. And each property I do, I feel like I try to push it further and the customers enjoy it. They think it's awesome because I'm not just selling a bed. It's an experience. You're not coming to Maine to go to a business meeting. You're doing more than just sleeping. You're here because you have this idea about what you want your experience in Maine to be. And you have an idea about Maine and coastal Maine and Bar Harbor and Acadia, and you have certain values attached to it that you want to feel reflected in the offering. You want to feel like you made a good choice. You have good taste, so you chose a tasteful place. And so honestly I feel like I get a return on it. Part of the reason why I do it is because I just like art. I've always liked art, even when I was a kid, I liked to draw. But I do feel like I get a return on it. The customers appreciate it and it becomes part of the experience. They say, oh wow, I love this painting. We say, oh, the gallery's 10 minutes that way. Go talk to Tierra. She'll tell you all about it and she'll sell you one. And people are like, that was the highlight. So I'm not catering to some unknown group of art fanatics that's out there somewhere. They're just regular people like you and I. They're not some sort of art savant, but people just like it.

Lisa Belisle: If I'm understanding this correctly, one of the pieces that you bought from the Portland Art Gallery is from one of our painters, Carlos.

Stephen Coston: Oh yes. I have I think three paintings from Carlos. Two huge ones and a small one.

Lisa Belisle: And he is wonderful and also he's got a very specific look to his paintings. So tell me what it is about his work that you connected with.

Stephen Coston: So I can tell you exactly what happened. I was opening this hotel. I'd bought it, it used to be called the Quimby House, and we were completely redesigning it. And we came up with the name Little Fig Hotel. And it was supposed to be sort of eccentric, but not too much. Eccentric but still classic in a lot of ways. I don't like to be weird just for the sake of it. I like to be eccentric, but within the confines of taste. I'm not just trying to be weird to push the envelope. I want it to be interesting but not like, wow, that's just out there. And I felt like to supply that hotel, which is only 23 rooms, so it's not a huge one, I don't know how many truckloads of stuff I bought from antique stores all over the state. That's how I decorated it. Just one piece at a time. It must have been a hundred trips to different antique stores. Every piece of furniture was just, we didn't do any mass ordering. It was all just, I want this bed, I want that chair, I want this mirror. And we kind of went with the color scheme of a fig. We painted the doors bright red. The accent walls are like plum blue colored, there's some light greens in there. And so I felt like Carlos's paintings were again, eccentric but classic. They have the old school look, but they're also modern. It kind of blends the two. It's like transitional, I guess you could call it. I know that's more of a furniture style than an art thing, but so that just popped right off the page because I couldn't find the right painting. I wanted a really big painting and I just couldn't find one that was right. And then one morning I woke up and I went on Instagram and I think the painting's called Golden Age and it's like six feet tall and it popped up on Portland Art Gallery's page. And I just DMed him. I was like, I want it. I didn't even think about it. I don't even think I asked what the price was. It was perfect. It was no question about it.

Lisa Belisle: That's really amazing that somehow, so when I asked you how should I introduce you, you said, well, I'm an investor and real estate developer, but you are incredibly hands on in the work that you do. And you must have some very interesting visual sense to be able to pull all of this stuff together and say, yes, that's gonna work here. This isn't gonna work here. I want this here.

Stephen Coston: Yes. Like I said, I've always enjoyed art. I've always enjoyed design. When I was a kid, I had a period of time where I thought I wanted to be a fashion designer. And I've always been super into pretty much anything. I like clothing, I like cars, I like watches, I just like things that look good. I like things that I feel like are art. I feel like art is more than just what you would call art. I feel like certain cars are art, certain watches are works of art. Certain clothing is a work of art, sneakers. I used to collect sports cards when I was a kid. I liked sports, but I also enjoyed the design, the graphic design aspect. I tried designing my own sports cards at one point, in Photoshop. I did a lot of graphic design. I used to have a blog and I did all my own banners and my own little ads. So I guess it's just something that even though I have no formal training, I've thought about it a lot and I've practiced it a lot. And I think if you spend a lot of time on something, you eventually make a few mistakes, but you figure it out.

Lisa Belisle: So how did you end up with this strong interest in this kind of budding knowledge? And how did you end up going off and getting an education in finance?

Stephen Coston: Well, I had a blog about NBA basketball when I was young. And I was ultimately trying to parlay it into some sort of career as a writer or sports writer, sports journalist, something like that. But after I did it for like four or five years. And if I do something, I do it hard. I was blogging for probably 10 or 12 hours a day for like three years. I was completely nutty about it. So eventually it occurred to me one day, I was like, this isn't working. You're living in your parents' basement because this thing's not cutting the mustard here. And also, you don't even like it. At this point, you're just forcing yourself to do this every day. So one day I just wrote a post. I appreciate the people who read it. I had several hundred regular readers, it was cool to connect with those people, but it just wasn't enough. You need thousands and thousands of people. So I said I'm done. I apologize. I appreciate you guys, but I'm going a different direction. And I called my dad who is a CPA and he always tried to encourage me to get into either finance or accounting business and to go to college. And so I called him, I said, recommend me a book. And I think he was kind of like, are you serious? Because I had kind of shoved it aside for so long. And I was like, yes, recommend me a book. He's like, well, what kind of book? I was like, a book about the stock market, something business, gimme something. And he recommended me a book and I drove to the bookstore and bought it. And then from that day, immediately I just applied all of the, the 10, 12 hours a day went from blogging about basketball to reading about business. And then I think that same day I started the process of enrolling at university in the finance program. And I told my dad, I'm gonna graduate with a 4.0. And he laughed at me and I did. So I just get really into stuff and I like to set goals.

Lisa Belisle: So what was the book?

Stephen Coston: A Random Walk Down Wall Street by Burton Malkiel, whose philosophy I now completely disagree with. So the random walk theory is basically the idea that all relevant information is priced into stock prices and therefore you can't beat the market. So you should just buy an index fund. That's a really simplified view of it, but that's completely bunk. Warren Buffett's a real person. He exists. And so do others like him. It's very hard to do. It's one of those ideas that's roughly correct, but precisely wrong.

Lisa Belisle: You told me earlier that you used to not like to read.

Stephen Coston: I hated reading. There was nothing I hated more than reading.

Lisa Belisle: And now you like to read quite a bit.

Stephen Coston: I hated reading right up until I told my dad to recommend me a book. And I didn't honestly, I wasn't sure if I believed that I was gonna even be able to do it, but I wanted to try. But immediately I just had no problem with it all of a sudden. And I think what happened was I started to like reading when I was actually in high school, because I was always on the internet on message boards. I was making thousands of posts on basketball message boards, sneaker message boards, and like long posts, not just like, oh, neat. I was having big arguments with people. I spent a lot of time doing that. And that's reading. You're reading the posts, you're writing, it's reading and writing. And so I think I finally realized like, oh, you came to like reading that way. So I think that's what happened. Obviously I don't know for sure, but that seems logical.

Lisa Belisle: So it wasn't that you disliked reading, you disliked reading in the format it had been offered to you.

Stephen Coston: I think I was a little bit stubborn and a little bit close-minded and I didn't realize how much material is out there on how many different things. And you don't have to just be pigeonholed into the things that, I'm not knocking what they ask you to read in school. But those things, for whatever reason, didn't generally resonate with me. And I didn't stop to think about, well it's not the reading that's the problem, it's just you're not interested. And so I don't know why that didn't occur to me.

Lisa Belisle: How did you end up going towards politics? You were on the Bar Harbor Town Council for three years.

Stephen Coston: I would describe that as another accident. So when I did the little 12 room motel and redeveloped it, it was a realtor that introduced me to the idea. And he was like, well you should buy this one because you can fix it up and then there's also development potential. I was like, no, there isn't. Hotels and motels aren't an allowed use in this district. This one's only here because of his grandfather. And that was all I knew about zoning at that time because I had looked at that property and been like, oh, could we rebuild it? I didn't know anything. I was in my mid twenties. And my dad, I think, or somebody had told me, no, that zoning got changed years ago. You can't build a hotel or motel there so you're stuck with the 12 rooms. But this realtor came to me, he's like, no, you can build a bed and breakfast. In Bar Harbor in 2010, they changed the rules and they allowed bed and breakfast. There's five bed and breakfast definitions in Bar Harbor. Bar Harbor has the world's most confusing land use ordinance. I swear it's probably worse than Manhattan. It's the craziest document anybody's ever seen. It's ridiculous. There's five different bed and breakfast definitions. I think there's like 20 total different lodging uses. It's crazy. And nobody knows which one is which. There's transient accommodation, which can be a hotel or a motel. There's hotel, there's motel, there's campground cabin. So bed and breakfast three and five can be new construction. So that was number one. And then number two, they don't put a room or size limit on the building. And all it says is that you have to serve breakfast and a designated employee, not necessarily the owner, has to live there. And I said, well that's a hotel. And he was like, but according to the town of Bar Harbor, it's a bed and breakfast. Read it. It's the plain language. And I read it and I was like, well, seems right to me. So we did it and I thought nothing of it. I'm in my mid twenties, I've never done this before. I hire this engineer, he draws out the site plan. I go down to planning board, I'm like, this is gonna be one meeting. It's plain language. And then all of a sudden everybody started asking all these questions about, well I don't feel like it meets the spirit of the ordinance, or it doesn't meet the definition of this particular term. And I was like, oh God, this is bad. Because we'd already spent a decent amount of money hiring the engineer and stuff. And we ended up spending six figures before we ever got anywhere. And I'm in my mid twenties, I got my mom haranged into this. It was not great. And it had to go through design review, planning board and appeals board. And each time, if one vote had gone differently, it was done. And I still feel to this day pretty strongly that if you just read the plain language, it's clearly, hey, I didn't make these rules. I get it. It's weird to me that a bed and breakfast could be 30 or 40 rooms. I understand. But I didn't write these rules. I was 21 years old in 2010. I was at the YMCA shooting baskets. I didn't know what a land use ordinance was. So a lot of people unfortunately believe that I pulled one over, and now I've done it twice because I've done two of these new build bed and breakfast things, and they feel like I've cheated the spirit of the ordinance. But the whole point of an ordinance is that it doesn't have a spirit, it's words, so that it's fair and everyone can understand it. Or at least that was my impression. So I'm just reading the plain language and it's like, okay, if somebody lives here and you serve breakfast, then you're good. And I went down there and I was shocked to find that it was not an open and shut case. If there was one thing I wish people could understand about my business in Bar Harbor, Maine, because this has become a very public topic of discussion for years and it's generated a lot of animosity. We've had our properties get vandalized. I stopped at a stop sign last summer and I looked up and it said Stephen Coston sucks on it. And then I realized there was like a dozen more stop signs in town that said that. And somebody hung a giant banner off the side of one of my motels that said, build homes, not hotels, labor rights, Bar Harbor, all this. And it was all related back to this idea that we pulled this fast one. But I just wish people could understand, I understand the rules are weird, I'm on your team. I'll tell you how to go petition the town office to change them if you think that it's bad. I don't think it's necessarily bad. I think these are positive developments in my opinion, but you don't have to agree with that. I just wish people understood that I went in there in my mid twenties with no understanding of anything. I couldn't have pulled a fast one if I wanted to. I learned all this stuff through the process. I almost fired my attorney because I was so dumb. I didn't know anything because he was trying to explain something to me. And I thought he was just being stubborn and being a jerk and trying to get it off his desk. But this attorney ended up being like one of the heroes of the whole thing. He figured out some of the basic ways to demonstrate how to explain how this met the definition in a way that resonated, that I wouldn't have been able to figure out on my own. And I was one phone call from firing that dude. I called the engineer. I was like, I'm so mad at this guy, I wanna fire him. And he was like, Stephen, do not, I forbid you, put your phone down, don't do that. So I just wish people understood that it's not a straight line.

Lisa Belisle: So with all that animosity, the fact that you continue to purchase properties and try to develop them and bring people to Bar Harbor, where you're from, which was theoretically the idea of building the economy, that's an interesting kind of conflict I would think.

Stephen Coston: Yes. I love the business, and I'm not gonna sit here and complain. Hotels, lodging, it's a very public facing business. You're buying these big structures, they're on main roads, everybody sees them. So I understand that. I get it. I made my bed, I'll sleep in it. I just wish that the argument around it was more fact based and less of this not true narrative of how it all happened and came together. But I love the business. It doesn't really, I don't have any thoughts when I'm about to buy a property about like, oh no, is somebody gonna get mad at me. If I'm following the rules and I'm doing well by my customers and our staff members and we're offering a good product that I can be proud of and that gets good reviews and stuff, to me that validates in and of itself. You can argue all day if you want that Bar Harbor doesn't need another hotel. Bar Harbor doesn't need another motel. Bar Harbor doesn't need another bed and breakfast. But if you put it out there and it's full every night and the staff is getting great wages and they love their job and the customers are thrilled and you're getting great reviews and it's full at high prices, well, you can argue on some vague moral standard that we don't need it, but the market's answering the question for you. If Bar Harbor didn't need it in a fundamental sense, I'd be bankrupt. There'd be nobody there.

Lisa Belisle: Which is essentially what you saw with your blog, that you went down a path and you decided the need wasn't there.

Stephen Coston: Right. The need wasn't there. I thought it was really cool, but what I didn't get when I did my blog that I got with the hotels, this was a big realization for me. I did the blog for myself. I was writing to myself. I was writing about what I wanted to write about. And then when I tried to transition out of that, I started to hate it. And I was like, okay, that's not the career for you. And then when I did the hotels, I loved doing stuff that the customers wanted. I didn't care if it was the couch that I wanted. That's the couch that the customers are gonna like, that fits the vibe of what we're doing. Maybe I wouldn't decorate my house this way, but it works. And this is fun. And I like trying to identify what's gonna make the customers feel like they got exactly what they wanted. Henry Ford had a saying that if you asked the customer what they wanted, they'd say faster horses. Customers often have this sort of uncertain feeling about, they know what they're trying to feel or what they're trying to see, but they can't quite, they couldn't create it themselves. They need you to create it for them and then show it to them and then be like, that's it. And so I like doing that. I didn't like doing that with blogging about basketball. I was too passionate about the subject. I just wanted to write about what I wanted to write about. With hotels, I live in a tiny house, sparsely furnished. This isn't a personal thing of mine. It's something I enjoy in the context of doing it for other people and doing business well.

Lisa Belisle: So what's interesting about what you're describing to me is that you are fundamentally describing creativity and art, because when I talk to people who are self-described artists, and I mean people who paint, it is that same thing that you're talking about, that it's for them, but it's also a conversation with other people.

Stephen Coston: The viewer feels something. You're trying to move, you're trying to resonate with them. You're right. I'm not saying that I think something's ugly and I put it in my hotel because I think the customer's gonna like it. No, I like it too. It's just, like I said, it may not be how I do my house. I think it's tasteful. I think it's good, but it's totally aimed at trying to identify what the customer wants to feel. So I agree with you. I'd never thought of it like that. That's a good point. But in that sense, I think it is an art form in and of itself because you're using visual, touch, sound cues, whether it's the music you play in the lobby or the texture or the look of the painting, to try to generate the feeling that you think the customer wants to feel. And then you just have to take in the feedback to see if you're hitting the pitch or not. And I think a big thing for me is I think taste is really underrated as a virtue. One of my favorite quotes is from a Spanish philosopher from the 16 hundreds. I'm not gonna try to pronounce his name because I won't get it right. It's from a book called The Art of Worldly Wisdom. And it goes something along the lines of, three things are at the acme of true nobility, fertile intelligence, keen power of judgment, and a pleasant, relevant taste. And the first time I ever read that quote, I was like, okay, everybody would say intellect and judgment. Everybody holds those on the highest standard. Every philosopher from Socrates to Confucius is gonna, nobody's gonna disagree with that. But who puts taste on there? Who puts taste with intelligence and judgment? And pleasant, relevant. So it's towards others, it's not just what you think. It's outward facing. So I hold taste on a much higher level than it's generally held. It's a really nice thing to have in your life. To be tasteful, pleasant. It's the spice of life, you know what I mean? Intellect and judgment's cool. But what are we here for? And I remember reading a book by a guy, Edward O. Wilson, who was an evolutionary theorist, scientist. He's a biologist. And he wrote a book called The Meaning of Human Existence. And basically the thesis was that the meaning of human life is kind of what you make it, there is no meaning. We're a product of a lot of randomness and a long string of chance occurrences and some structured randomness. And so the point of life is culture. The point of human life is the human aspect of it. It's the arts, it's music, it's stuff like that. I agree with that. So I think that ties in with how taste is underrated because taste is what makes that stuff.

Lisa Belisle: Do you think people trust their own sense of taste enough?

Stephen Coston: No, I don't. Well I think you have your typical spectrum. Some people I'm sure are overconfident, some are way at the other end. But I think the average person, if they put in the effort, I don't think anybody can just walk in and start doing great stuff. You gotta learn and try, read a book, do something, fail, learn from it. But I think if people were more willing to put themselves out there and take risks, they would develop a much stronger sense of taste than they realized existed in themselves. I believe in the theory that most things are not done because they're not attempted. So I agree with you.

Lisa Belisle: So from the beginning of our conversation, I've been thinking about this book that I just listened to that Malcolm Gladwell did with Paul Simon. Is this a book that seems familiar to you?

Stephen Coston: I know Malcolm Gladwell and I've read several of his books, but I don't recognize the other name.

Lisa Belisle: Well, Paul Simon is a singer songwriter. He's the Simon and Garfunkel guy.

Stephen Coston: Oh, okay. I know Simon and Garfunkel. Yes. I haven't read this one.

Lisa Belisle: Well, you might be interested.

Stephen Coston: If it's a book, I'm interested.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I happen to listen to it, it's an audio book, and I thought it was really well done because it incorporated Paul Simon's music and kind of origin stories of some of his songs. But they also referenced a person who talked about creativity and how some artists are kind of born a certain way, this is their concept and they're gonna engage in the world this way. This kind of starts and ends at the beginning. And then they talk about other people and their creativity that they kind of grow into as a result of exactly what you're describing. Trying, failing, evolving.

Stephen Coston: I've always kind of believed that there's so much information out there and there's so many people out there who want to talk about so many different things. Especially now with the internet. You can find anything, you can get a book on your doorstep the next day. You can read it online, watch a video about it on YouTube. I feel like whatever you want to be, you can pretty much, if it exists, you can know it. I've always felt like I couldn't have done what Einstein did and reconciled Newton's this to whatever and come up with E equals MC squared. I couldn't do that. That's a product of him. But now that it's known and it's out there, if I want to put in the effort that it really takes to understand that difficult thing, I could do that. The only reason why I'm not an expert in it is because I've chosen not to be, I haven't put in the time necessary. The information is known. It's out there. You could read every book about it. You could spend the rest of your life studying it, and I'm sure you'd become an expert at it. And that's the way I feel about most things. And I understand that some people have different capacities for visual versus auditory or kinesthetic. But at the end of the day, there are certain guidelines and principles and things that do apply. There's a reason why this room looks nice and it's not unexplainable. There are principles of color and dimension and scale and stuff like that. Why a picture looks good on one wall, you can learn this stuff if you want to. And that's the kind of stuff that I've learned throughout this. I feel like I always had a pretty good knack for like, oh, that's a nice looking picture. And maybe that's more abstract, but probably five years ago I'd have put it on the totally wrong wall. It would've been out of proportion, or I would've put it next to something, and I'd kind of always feel like that's not quite right. And now I feel like I don't make nearly as many of those mistakes. I can just detect that, okay, that's why it's not quite right. It needs to be an inch higher. And that just comes from practice, I think.

Lisa Belisle: Have you read the book, The Design of Everyday Things?

Stephen Coston: I have not.

Lisa Belisle: You may want to.

Stephen Coston: I probably should.

Lisa Belisle: It kind of speaks to what you're describing.

Stephen Coston: Seeing as my career is designing everyday things, hotel spaces, I should probably read that one.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I just started it, and as a fellow lover of books and reading, I feel like you might be something that will, I'll let you decide.

Stephen Coston: I'll add it to my backlog. I just ordered 42 books, I think.

Lisa Belisle: Well that'll keep you busy.

Stephen Coston: I think having unread books around is valuable because it reminds you how much you don't know. It reminds you how ignorant you are. It's like, okay, I feel good, I read this book, I read that book, and then you look over there and you're like, okay, the pile of unread ones is way bigger.

Lisa Belisle: It's possibilities, right?

Stephen Coston: Yes.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I very much enjoyed our conversation today and now I'm kind of interested to see how you've incorporated art into the work that you're doing with hospitality and all of your properties up in Bar Harbor. So I may have to come visit.

Stephen Coston: You should. We've got a really great art collection and like I said, almost all of it ties back to Maine in some way. So it's really cool.

Lisa Belisle: Thank you for driving down today and for joining me in this part of the state.

Stephen Coston: This is one of the few places in Maine I had never been in my life, so my pleasure.

Lisa Belisle: Okay, very good. I've been speaking with Stephen Coston and I actually hesitate to even try to label him. I'm just gonna say he's a creative spirit and entrepreneur who is really doing very interesting things and it's been quite a learning experience for me today on Radio Maine. I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle. Thank you for watching or listening, and please do go visit. What is your website again, Stephen?

Stephen Coston: StayBarHarbor.com. Stay Bar Harbor. Where are you going? Bar Harbor. What are you doing? You're staying. StayBarHarbor.com.

Lisa Belisle: Absolutely. Take the time to look into their properties because Bar Harbor is a lovely place and it sounds like Stephen is doing very interesting things up there. So thank you for coming in today.

Stephen Coston: Yes, thank you very much. This was fun.