Jersey Banks and Lyon Porter of Urban Cowboy on Nostalgia, Community, and Building Hotels That Feel Like Home

In 2014, Lyon Porter bought a townhouse in Brooklyn and opened it up to the world. There was no business plan, no marketing budget, and no particular intention to build a hospitality brand. Within six months, Urban Cowboy was in every major magazine in the world. Twelve years, four hotels, a standalone bar, and a newly announced engagement later, Porter and his co-founder and partner Jersey Banks sat down with Adam Mogelonsky from their lodge in the Catskills — two and a half hours north of Manhattan, in the dead center of one of the most beautiful protected wilderness areas on the East Coast — to explain what Urban Cowboy is, how it got here, and why the best amenity at their Catskills property is the absence of cell phone service.

The conversation covers the full arc of the Urban Cowboy story: the organic social media phenomenon that started with a photographer flying in from London to shoot a log cabin in Brooklyn, the philosophy of design as collage and personal expression, the role of fire and elemental spaces in building genuine community between strangers, the challenges of adaptive reuse in 19th-century buildings, the evolution of the beverage program toward non-alcoholic options, and a glimpse at what comes next for a brand that has consistently arrived in a city just before it explodes.

What is Urban Cowboy?

The name is not about the movie. It is about a romantic nostalgia for Americana — a thread that runs through the design, the programming, and the ethos of every property. "It's always based in this nostalgia for the design style of early Americana mixed with this irreverent sense of freedom that cowboys have always equated to in Americana," Banks and Porter explain. "That romance of that freedom of the cowboy spirit is woven through both the design and the experience of every property."

The portfolio today spans four hotels and a standalone bar: Urban Cowboy Brooklyn, where it all started; Urban Cowboy Nashville, the first boutique hotel in that city when it opened in 2016; the Dive Motel, also in Nashville; Urban Cowboy Lodge in the Catskills, a 200-acre resort with 13 buildings, two bars, a 120-year-old pool, and a two-lane bowling alley where guests put the pins back themselves; and Urban Cowboy Denver, housed in an 1880s mansion built by a silk hat baron who, by most accounts, later became either an arms dealer or a bootlegger. "The history of the building will tell you a lot," Banks and Porter say. The most recent addition is Urban Cowboy Bar, an 8,000-square-foot, three-floor standalone bar in downtown Nashville — the brand's first venue without a hotel attached.

The Catskills and the case for nature escape

The interview is recorded on June 29, 2026, with Europe in the grip of a heat wave severe enough to melt stoplights in Berlin. The Catskills, by contrast, stay cool at night even when New York City hits 100 degrees — a fact that has drawn people north from the city for well over a century.

"Before air conditioning, this was your natural AC," Banks and Porter explain. "People would come up here in their Ford Model Ts and escape the city for two or three months." The Catskills has lived many different lives as a destination: the naturalist escape of the Walden era, the Borscht Belt resort culture immortalized in Dirty Dancing, the Woodstock generation, and most recently the wave of Brooklyn-based creatives and young families who began moving north about a decade ago — a trend that accelerated dramatically during the pandemic. Urban Cowboy Lodge opened one week before the March 2020 lockdown, and then reopened that June as many New Yorkers' first trip outside their apartments.

How a photographer from London built the brand

Urban Cowboy's marketing story is one of the more remarkable in contemporary hospitality. The brand has never spent a dollar on marketing. What it has done is create spaces so photographically compelling that the world did the work for them.

In the first week after opening in Brooklyn, a photographer named Jared Chambers emailed from London, offering to shoot the property in exchange for a weekend in the log cabin. "We quickly created an Instagram and said, 'Hey, we should probably do that,'" Banks and Porter recall. Chambers came, shot the property, posted it to his following, and Urban Cowboy immediately became a hub for some of the best photographers and creatives in the world. "I'd get calls from people who were having brunch in London saying, 'I just saw Urban Cowboy.'" The brand went on to be voted the most Instagrammable hotel in the world.

The aesthetic logic is deliberate. "I look at these as immersive art pieces that you can stay in," Banks and Porter say. "All of our properties are almost cinematic in design and really set the stage for you to sink into the experience." The properties have hosted Garth Brooks's documentary, album cover shoots, film productions including a successful horror film at the Catskills lodge, and, on the day of this recording, a Netflix shoot in the 1800s bar with the bowling alley. The brand is highly selective about what it allows on site. "Is this on brand? Are we excited about it?" is the test.

Design as collage, buildings as collaborators

Every Urban Cowboy property has a different design aesthetic, but they all share a sensibility: they are layered, handmade, found, and personal. "I look at them as albums," Banks and Porter say. "Each one is a representation of where we are creatively." The approach to sourcing is genuinely eccentric — driving trucks across the country picking up found objects, filling spaces without knowing where anything will go, then building up layers of textures, colors, custom hand-printed wallpaper, and hand-carved furniture until it feels right.

The buildings themselves are active collaborators in this process. All Urban Cowboy properties are adaptive reuse projects in historic buildings over 100 years old. "You don't have to decide much," Banks and Porter explain. "The space itself gives you a lot." A Victorian mansion in Denver has windows of different sizes, ceilings built for Victorian furniture, and walls made of plaster that is essentially concrete — it tells you what you can do with it. Nashville is Music City, so Nashville gets a musical parlor where guests can play instruments and where Bon Iver, staying at the property, came down one morning and played with the band. "You listen to what the building and the people tell you about these spaces and then the design pairs with how you put it together."

The design process is also never finished. "The projects are never done," Banks and Porter say. "You also see the pathways people walk once you've opened and build new experiences along those pathways."

The mechanics of adaptive reuse

The romantic version of restoring a 19th-century building tends to skip over what actually happens once you open the walls. "HVAC, plumbing, electric, and mechanicals are always triple the cost and triple the time, no matter what anyone tells you," Banks and Porter say. "And so weaved through all different types of systems." Every Urban Cowboy property has been in a different state, each with different building codes and historic preservation requirements, and each has presented its own specific challenge — including the basic problem of getting hot water to 20 different clawfoot tubs spread across an 1880s mansion. "The plans, however well laid, always have to be tweaked in the moment, like a lot of the design. And so it's always iterative. It's always a headache."

The brand's approach across all of this is best described by their own term for it: they cowboy it. "Rather than bootstrap," they say, "we'll cowboy it and wing certain things." The Catskills Lodge began as a purchase of the main lodge on 68 acres, then expanded over three years of negotiation to acquire a resort across the river, ultimately combining both sides of a mountain valley into a 200-acre property with a 120-year-old pool, a bowling alley, and five additional lodging options. "You really don't know how something's gonna function until you open it, listen to people, watch their experience, and tweak it."

Arrive as strangers, leave as friends

The social philosophy of Urban Cowboy is expressed most clearly in the tagline that appears on the first page of every property's website: arrive as strangers, leave as friends. It is not a marketing line, Banks and Porter insist. "The people we've met at our properties sitting by the fire and having a cocktail with have become some of our best friends." Guests who met at their properties have since gotten married, traveled together for years, and had children. "It's not only changed our lives but that communal spirit is what we design around."

The mechanism for this is elemental. Every Urban Cowboy property is built around fire — fire pits, fireplaces, wood-burning installations — as well as water in the form of clawfoot tubs, river plunges, and pools. Nashville has a Fire Concierge who manages eight different fires across the property throughout the evening. "These are the ancient, historic things people sat around and communed and ate and talked about the day." The idea is that placing people near something elemental makes the social threshold lower. "You have to make it a really easy thing for them to sit down and talk to a stranger, and then you kind of see what happens — they usually interact."

The model is explicitly not exclusive. There are no membership requirements, no velvet rope, no Soho House barrier to entry. "Anyone can come. These are public spaces." That mixture of locals and travelers at the bar, around the fire, in the parlor, is the point. "When you travel, you want not only to stay at a beautifully designed property, but one that is embraced by a local community, and to meet people."

No TVs, no cell service, and a phone detox discount

Urban Cowboy has no televisions in any of its rooms across any property. "We don't want people to just stay in their rooms. We want them to experience the sense of comfort of bathing and relaxing and getting a really good night's rest, but for the experiential traveler, they are also looking for connection." The rooms are designed to invite guests into the communal spaces, not to contain them.

At the Catskills Lodge, the invitation goes further. The property has no cell phone service outside the buildings — not as a policy, but as a geographic fact. "We say our biggest amenity in the Catskills is there's no cell phone service." The brand leaned into this with a promotional activation: guests who handed over their phones for the weekend received a 20% discount on their stay. "People are tired of being on screens, and we invite people to be present in the moment."

Activities at the lodge reflect the same philosophy: an Estonian sauna with a river plunge, tree nets suspended 50 feet up in the forest, a 120-year-old pool, two-lane bowling where guests reset the pins themselves, tennis, shuffleboard, and fly fishing. "Nostalgic and fun things that don't revolve around alcohol, mixed with health and wellness without leading with it."

Beverage: capital B, non-alcoholic included

Food and beverage at Urban Cowboy is handled differently across every property — Roberta's Michelin-starred pizza in Nashville, wood-fired food from Monarch in Denver, a full-service restaurant at the Catskills Lodge, and Frankie's Spuntino pizza at the Urban Cowboy Bar in Nashville. The constants are that the beverage program is always run in-house and always taken seriously.

The evolution of that program now includes a significant focus on non-alcoholic options — a shift the brand is responding to not as a trend exercise but as a genuine change in guest behavior. "If you're watching your numbers, you see it," Banks and Porter say. Nashville is still an extremely alcohol-forward town, but Urban Cowboy's head of beverage recently expanded the non-alcoholic menu to 10 different options, developed by a bartender who specializes in tea-based extracts, ashwagandha mushrooms, and health tonics. "A lot of times the NA menu is a couple of little options and really just a sugar bomb," Banks and Porter say. "We're really developing that into our beverage program." Denver, where the cultural norms around alcohol are different and where cannabis is legal, has also shaped how the brand thinks about what people want when they go out — which is not necessarily a drink, but always a reason to be with other people. "People still wanna go out. They still wanna commune. They still wanna be with people."

What comes next

Banks and Porter are, for the first time in 12 years, not in construction. They are sitting at their lodge in the Catskills with their five-year-old daughter, their 13-year-old son, and a Great Dane, having just gotten engaged after building six businesses together. "We've done everything backwards," they say. "We opened six businesses together, then had a child, and now we're engaged to be married."

The next move is being considered carefully. The brand is in various stages of conversation with partners and family offices about larger properties — 50 rooms and up — and is looking at nature escapes as well as urban locations. A beach property is in the pipeline, in a location Banks and Porter describe only as "very Hemingway-inspired." International locations, including a town in Mexico where they spent a summer on the beach, are also under consideration. Branded residences are a long-term ambition, drawing on Porter's background in luxury real estate development and the $3 billion in Manhattan and Brooklyn residential projects he led before Urban Cowboy.

"We feel like we're just getting started," Banks and Porter say. "Stay tuned for next moves. But if you haven't experienced Urban Cowboy, come stay in the Catskills, Nashville, or Denver."