Ask Maxime Friess what he plans to do with $35 million, and he will start by telling you what he won’t do with it.
The CEO and co-founder of Eterniti, the villa and chalet group behind Bo House, Verbier Exclusive, and Emerald Stay, has no interest in owning real estate, and none in making a Verbier chalet feel like a Hamptons beach house, even as a new $35 million investment sends the group across the Atlantic.
“We don’t want cookie cutter,” Friess told me over a video call earlier this summer. “We’re not trying to harmonize design everywhere.”
Hotel flags moving into private homes barely registered as a worry. Eterniti is a preferred partner of Homes & Villas by Marriott Bonvoy, which he sees as a distribution layer rather than a rival that poaches homeowners, and he said resort developers bolting villas onto a hotel are built to sell the homes, not distribute them.
“Our real competition is these small, fragmented operators that are really doing a great job locally, regionally,” he said. “Our job is to try to convince them to join us.”
The playbook is asset-light and acquisition-heavy. Eterniti buys operators with roughly EUR 5 million to EUR 15 million ($5.8 million to $17.5 million) in annual booking value — about seven so far — integrates them, and helps each grow at home by tucking in smaller regional players and signing individual homeowners. Its first American deal, closed last year in the Hill Country outside Austin, is the template: The two co-founders now run Eterniti’s Americas business as CEO and president, and the team has since signed at least 15 to 20 additional homes. More American deals are already in the works, Friess teased.
The pitch to owners is a study in having it both ways. A second-home owner wants the operator who drives past the house every day.
“There’s this reassuring element rather than saying, 'Hey, I’m working with a global, multinational group,'” Friess said.
Yet owners also want an international network, brand equity, and tech, so corporate offers the local teams a toolbox for marketing and lead generation rather than a mandate. What it does insist on is measurement: Guest and owner satisfaction scores sit beside gross booking value and profitability at every board meeting, and Friess said both have risen over the past two or three years.
For travelers, the more interesting part is what Friess thinks a villa can do that a hotel can’t. He described the product in three layers. The base is the hardware and the property management that keeps it running, so “you won’t have the boiler breaking in the middle of a stay.” Then the amenities. Then service on par with a Dior boutique or a Four Seasons, delivered by sales reps with personality, some of whom run entire bookings over WhatsApp.
That flexibility is showing up in longevity requests.
“I’m spending $300,000 for a week or 10 days, but I want my cold plunge, it has to be that brand,” Friess said, channeling one guest.
Standards still exist. Above a certain weekly rate, turndown is mandatory, but each team decides how: In Verbier, a pillow mist and lip balm for dry mountain air; in a warmer market, you might find a fan by a local designer.
Even the Eterniti name is negotiable. The group once planned to fold Verbier Exclusive, a 25-chalet, single-resort brand, into Bo House, then noticed how attached clients were to the niche.
“If being a global brand gets in the way of what guests and owners are looking for, then we will just address it and maybe push less forward Eterniti and more forward the local brands," Friess said.
In a luxury market busy consolidating, Friess is betting $35 million that the fastest way to get big is to stay small everywhere it counts.
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