A Home Away from Home
Behind Hotel Granduca’s First-Class Service
Tucked away across from Uptown Park is a little gem of a hotel inspired by Italy. Elegant, intimate and inviting, Hotel Granduca offers its guests luxurious accommodations but what truly sets it apart is its exceptional service, evident the minute you’re greeted at the door.
Behind the hotel’s personalized service is a diverse group of employees, many of whom have been forced to leave their homelands thousands of miles away from Houston and for whom Granduca has become a second home.
More than 20 languages, including Arabic, Spanish, French and Italian, are spoken by the hotel’s staff. They all have different stories, but many share similar experiences that allow them to relate well with co-workers and guests who come from all corners of the world.
Founded by Houston luxury real estate developer Giorgio Borlenghi, Hotel Granduca was recently listed among Trip Advisor’s 2018 Top 25 Luxury Hotels in America. It also belongs to Leading Hotels of the World, an exclusive consortium of hotels that must meet exacting standards of quality.
When the hotel opened in 2006, then-manager Mary Grace Gray hired many refugees who resettled in Houston through the YMCA and Interfaith Ministries. The hotel focused on hiring employees who would stay with them long term, making them feel part of a team and giving them opportunities to learn a skill and move up.
Felix Yirate was one of those early hires. He has worked in security at Granduca since the start of 2007, ensuring that hotel staff and guests feel safe. He was displaced from his home in Ogoni, a 404-square-mile region in southeast Nigeria, where he was an activist. The Ogoni people staged massive protests against the exploitation of their natural resources by Shell. In 1995, Nigeria’s military regime under Sani Abacha executed nine Ogoni environmental activists.
“[Abacha] killed a lot of people, women, children, so we had to run,” said Yirate.
He went into hiding and then escaped to neighboring Benin Republic, where he spent 10 tough years in a UN refugee camp. He resettled in Houston with three young cousins in the fall of 2006. The YMCA helped him secure a job and the two-bedroom apartment in southwest Houston where Yirate still lives today.
Yirate delights in the fact that he has been back to Nigeria three times and that his job has allowed him to put relatives through college and build them homes. “This place has molded me, built me to be somebody and not only me but my entire family,” he said.
While he misses friends, the sea and playing soccer, he feels at home at the hotel working and learning with people of other nationalities. “When I was displaced, one of the problems I was facing was fear,” said Yirate. “So when I came to [the hotel], I found comfort here, I found peace here.”
Peace is what Selam Gebrehiwet was after when she left her home in Eritrea, a tiny nation in the Horn of Africa. The country has been mired in conflict since the late 1990s, forcing many of its people to leave. She spent some time in Kenya and later settled in Montreal, but on a visit to Los Angeles she met her husband and moved to the U.S.
Four years ago, on her second day in Houston, she applied for a job at Granduca. Her cousin had worked there since the hotel opened and had promised to help her find a job. Unsure of what position to apply for—she had no prior hospitality experience—she wrote in “banquets.” But when the manager asked her what she meant by that, she was stumped.
“I said, ‘I’m honest with you, I don’t know. They told me to put banquet, then you’re gonna train me and I’m going to work, just work,’” she said, laughing.
The manager hired her as a barback. Now a server, Gebrehiwet’s shift starts at 6am, before hotel guests start trickling into the elegant dining room of Ristorante Cavour for breakfast. Her favorite part of her job comes later during afternoon tea, where she serves guests tea and beautifully presented tea sandwiches and sweets.
Like other Granduca employees, Gebrehiwet felt welcome at the hotel. “I liked it from the start. [I thought], ‘Wow, my gosh, everybody is nice.’ I felt comfortable.”
As the evening closes in at Hotel Granduca, before guests retreat to their suites for the night, housekeeping supervisor Cecilia Vinueza makes sure that every room is ready for its occupants to relax.
During her shift, Vinueza oversees the hotel’s turn-down services, makes sure that her team leaves rooms impeccable and attends to guests’ requests. “My phone never stops ringing,” she said.
She started at Granduca as a lobby attendant nine years ago after moving to Houston to join her husband, Luis, who had been working and squaring away his immigration status while Vinueza raised their children in their native Ecuador. They had lived here before. In fact, Vinueza had been a housekeeper for the Borlenghis when she and Luis first came to the U.S. 26 years ago, forced to leave Ecuador when a financial crisis left them without a business and buried in debt. The plan was to go back when they had paid it off, but they didn’t have the resources to raise three children back home, so Luis stayed behind. They were apart for 12 years.
For five years, the entire family worked at Granduca. “That was good for all of us,” said Vinueza. The move was hard for her two sons and daughter. Her eldest son, Eduardo, and daughter, Diana, were already professionals in Ecuador and had to start from scratch when they arrived in Houston. Working at the hotel allowed them to learn new skills while they studied full time to restart their professional careers.
She and the kids all worked in different areas of the hotel, learning as much as they could. Despite Vinueza’s basic English when she arrived, she discovered that her disposition mattered more than how well she spoke the language. “Human beings have a universal language of smiles and looks, I learned that eye contact is important,” she said.
Today, Vinueza qualifies her English as acceptable, but she feels like a completely different person than when she arrived. “I’m not fearful anymore,” she said.
Yirate and Vinueza credit Gray and the hotel’s ownership with giving them an opportunity to grow. They refer to Gray, who managed the hotel from 2005 until 2015, as a mother figure who takes a personal interest in their lives. Vinueza recalls one day four years ago when Gray visited her at the hospital emergency room. That same morning Gray had been there checking on a front desk employee who also had to be rushed to the ER.
That respect and care filters down from the top to the staff to the guests, who feel as much at home at Granduca as the staff does. The hotel boasts a high number of repeat guests.
“When they return you feel so good because it means we’re doing our job, and it’s not just because of the place, which is very nice, but it’s the people,” said Vinueza. “It’s the people who make a difference.”
