Marx Realty’s Craig Deitelzweig Counts on Travel for Workplace Inspiration

Marx Realty President and CEO Craig Deitelzweig, center, often gets ideas while traveling for providing hotel perks to his firm’s office tenants that he can discuss with his team, which includes managing director of acquisitions Paul DiCarlo, left, and Chief Financial Officer Jagdish Shah, right. (Marx Realty)

Craig Deitelzweig, President and CEO of real estate developer Marx Realty, loves traveling and staying in unique hotels.

Many of his journeys have been about unwinding from work, but they also led to an epiphany he had about office properties: Why not adopt in workspaces the hospitality amenities that brought a smile to his face?

At Marx’s 10 Grand Central building in New York, office tenants are now whisked around Manhattan by a driver in a $100,000 Porsche Taycan electric car, billed as the first office feature of its kind. The idea came to Deitelzweig after he was driven in various hotel house cars including a Tesla Model X, an Audi, an SUV and even a Maserati offered at the luxury Faena Hotel in Miami Beach, Florida.

Many of Marx’s signature hospitality touches — a uniformed doorman outside each property, luxury-hotel-like lounges and terraces, and a distinct scent made with a perfumery, to name a few — were inspired by Deitelzweig’s trips.

“When it’s a more fun vehicle, it’s a better experience” for hotel guests, Deitelzweig said in an interview. “I thought, ‘Why aren’t we offering this?’ When you go to a hotel, you feel happy. We want people to feel good when they go to the office. We want to be the opposite of the white-marble antiseptic office experience. … Having the signature scent and music, a doorman outside opening the door. … All that matters. That’s what people can learn from the hospitality world.”