After spending 20 years as a financial advisor, and serving as a contributing writer for Wired magazine in the 1990s, Jeff walked away from finance in early 2009. The bug he caught from designing two homes—a Park City Utah mountain house built from the ground up and a San Francisco warehouse conversion (featured in Dwell's Dec/Jan 2012 issue, and online here)—solidified his desire to pursue a new dream: designing a boutique hotel in New Zealand. The research into this project has spanned the last three years, 25,000 kilometers on a motorbike, more than 20 countries, and at least 200 hotels. In between his job as an art consultant specializing in urban street art and running his online art site Chester’s Blacksmith Shop, he wanted to share some of his most inspiring finds with Dwell readers.