I don’t make a habit of comparing my social life to Andy Warhol’s. Sure, nightclubs in the 1970s and art warehouse parties look fun – but they were fun in the noughties too and I’m over it. However, what follows, looks like the kind of fun I could have now, so therefore makes me think this is the kind of fun I should be trying to have now. So be warned – if you’re anything like me, this may result in you trying to make fun plans…

Eothan summer camp (camp meaning small private leisure estate in the US) is 30 acres on Long Island. In the summer of 73 Warhol and a few friends began renting cottages on the 30-acre fishing estate which overlooks the Atlantic. Eothen (meaning from the East) consists of: four cottages, a five-bedroom main house, and an ocean view. Andy Warhol and his business partner Paul Morrissey bought the estate the following year for $235,000. One of the things I really admire about Andy Warhol is how he played with commerce, in everything that he did. He immediately rented out the main house to wealthy friends. That summer it was Jackie Onassis’ sister, Princess Lati, who took it — meaning the First Family went and stayed there that first summer. Effectively paying for itself — it meant the cottages hosted a loose, shifting community of artists, rock stars, and film people, living at close quarters with nowhere particular to be.

But this was no commune – that was not the style of Warhol or his entourage. There were dinners (sometimes a cook), and cocktail parties and beach picnics. People took turns to host and went to the local town for groceries to make gin slips. In a sense, it sounds like a bourgeois bohemian paradise, village life rather than a raucous ‘big house experience’ or the total deflation of time and space in the commune. Bohemia with boundaries. Idyllic.

And it takes a village …. to have a good party.

There is a particular kind of sociability that only a certain configuration can produce: multiple households in proximity, each with its own privacy, but with enough shared ground — a beach, a fire, a place to drift toward in the early evening — that things happen by accident rather than by arrangement. It is almost impossible to manufacture under one roof. Spread across five cottages on an Atlantic headland, Eothan seemed to spawn that kind of magic spontaneously.

Demand for group accommodation is rising steadily — reunions, friend getaways and multigenerational escapes have seen year on year growth of 23% since 2023 — but the challenge for larger properties is the shoulder season, when couples and small groups are the primary bookers and a ten-bedroom house becomes an obstacle rather than an asset. A cluster of smaller units around a central house solves this with elegance: the property can operate at scale when the occasion calls for it, and contract gracefully when it doesn't.

Why it matters now

This sort of fun, this mode of sociability is common and popular with a demographic who are about to get hold of the purse strings.

In the UK (and I am mainly referring to a UK context here) Millennials and younger have grown up with their friends, they have married later (if at all), and have far fewer children. The much talked about ‘transfer of wealth’ from Boomers to their descendants is on the horizon – and the people this wealth will go to will have a very different approach to spending it. This will have an enormous impact on the economy, and quickly.

Spending power has not been in the hands of the young for a long time. Millennials grew up with an almost no-growth economy. Mostly graduating either just before or not long after the 2008 crash, they are a generation who lack experience of saving and growing wealth. So what does this mean for the newly endowed? Well, I’m not a social scientist or an economist or even a gambler, but my money (if I had any), would be on the idea that they will be pretty, pretty spen-ny.

And not just that. Millennials, generally speaking, have a much more open mindset to different ways of living, different configurations of holidaying and with whom. They are very open to restructuring life to create more leisure. Many are disillusioned with work (as it stands) and are feeling very uncertain about what the future holds for their children (or dogs.) The desire to jump through the hoops only to reach the bottom wrung of the ladder is of course vanishing.

So, staring into my crystal ball of Eothan, it might just be that independent hospitality could see a big shift on the horizon. On both the demand side, with stark changes in the way people want to holiday – but also on the supply side. Large inheritances could spell a new era of independent hospitality projects and experiments. Early signs are already there. As the farms and estates shift from one generation to another we see very different and exciting approaches. Atholl Estates and Kip and Nook in Yorkshire are two I’ve seen recently where a new generation are doing things very differently.

If Warhol was a newly minted Millennial, what would he do? Well for one, he would have a summer-long roving party beachside. But I think he would probably sell tickets to the party. And maybe that’s where I’m going with this. Will the Warhol mode become the model for independent hospitality businesses? Instead of becoming more and more professional (like it feels at the moment), perhaps further in the future hospitality will look a little more like a semi-private social life. So more personal in a way, more networked, more like a party. And if the future is less meritocratic, less productivity focused, more chaotic and with a sprinkling of newly rich people around, then maybe we all need to start acting like we’re at a Warhol party. Be interesting. Be more, well… fun.

The estate's most recent chapter: owned latterly by J.Crew CEO Mickey Drexler, then sold by New York gallerist Adam Lindemann through Sotheby's International for $65 million. Some of the photographs from that listing are below.