01
Opening
The building is nearly finished. The experience, the team and the story are not.
Anne Schaeflein
Hotelier & Creative Director
I curate experiences that transform luxury hotels, residences, estates and organisations into places people belong to. Then I measure what they yield.
Begin a conversationPoint of view
Most projects perfect the building and approximate the experience.
Yet it is no decoration. It is the operating model a guest can feel: how a place is designed, staffed, led, priced and told, and whether all of it agrees. When it does, people return, teams stay and value compounds. When it does not, no amount of marble or charm can rescue it.
That is the work, from the first drawing to the balance sheet.
When owners call me
02
Repositioning
A fine asset that has quietly stopped keeping its promise. For assets to be repurposed or regenerated, I work through NeuSpace, which I co-founded.
03
Residences and retail
Branded homes, where the experience must outlast the sale and owners expect to be known, not merely served. Luxury retail, where it must win in minutes.
04
Historic estates and heritage assets
Land and buildings whose past is their greatest asset, and whose future must pay for itself. For land intelligence before development, I work through TOPOS Intelligence, which I co-founded.
05
A gap at the top
Someone to lead the experience at board level, for a season or for good.
Three kinds of belonging
Place.
Concept, rooms, food and landscape: hotels, residences, retail and estates, new, historic or reimagined, with the owner's intent intact.
People.
The leaders, the team, and the culture a guest senses before a word is spoken.
Moments.
Arrivals, private dinners, gifts and gatherings, for owners, family offices and ultra-high-net-worth principals: the things people still describe years later.
As an adviser, I curate and lead the experience, then equip a team to sustain it. As an executive, I take full operational responsibility.
Signature story
Why a deli, among the hotels? Because there, I was the owner.
The name joined my two in old Scots: Corbie for the black bird in Krahé, Cheip for the small sheep in Schaeflein. My father began his working life as a baker and master pâtissier, so a shop on the corner of Bakers Wynd, in the town's former Gleneagles bakery, made me smile. I had developed the concept at Kinnaird Estate, and took it off the shelf for the early years of parenthood.
The place. The building dates from 1848. We restored its timber shopfront, had the ironmongery made, and found a hand-stencilled wallpaper attributed to Charles Rennie Mackintosh, which we preserved behind new panelling for the next generation. The furniture was antique, mismatched and mended.
The people. We became a launch pad for some seventy makers, working with them on taste, packaging and the road to market; several are thriving still. Mothers and fathers worked with us part-time, around their children.
The table. Soft-shell crabs, straight from fishermen who usually shipped them abroad. Heritage apples in baskets, free for any child. When the road outside was dug up, we did not wait for it to reopen; we took the shop to the barrier, with tastings and conversation.
The occasions. We brought Audrey, a vintage mobile cinema, to town for a 1920s film night, and turned the street outside into a picture house. We asked the local school to bake a historic moment; parents came, guests voted, and a lemon sponge bearing an iced suffragette before the King's horse took the prize.
Michelin-starred chefs shopped with us; guests came from London and America. In 2017 our peers named Corbie & Cheip Deli of the Year at the Scottish Food Awards.
It was never meant to be forever. It was never only a shop.
Belonging is not a campaign. It is what you do when the easy route is closed.
Five places, briefly
Eleven international openings. Five general managerships. Projects valued between £1.2m and £85m, from the Scottish islands to the Red Sea coast. Answerable to owners and trusts, boards and chairmen; relied upon, discreetly, by family offices and ultra‑high‑net‑worth principals.
01/Dubai
OMNIYAT
From the Chairman's Office, I helped carry OMNIYAT from founder-led business to multi-entity group, with an Advisory Board, as it grew from 200 people to 750. Along the way I incubated Owner Experience for some 350 owners of OMNIYAT and Dorchester Collection residences.
02/London, Dubai & Amman
Campbell Gray Hotels
Part of the team behind three five-star openings in eighteen months: on the Isle of Islay, Scotland; in Manama, Bahrain; and in Thalwil, on Lake Zurich, Switzerland. Beyond the openings, a finger in every other pie: art, light, photography, design and operations across a seven-property group and its residences. Gordon Campbell Gray advised me to be a square table with round edges. I have been sanding the corners ever since.
03/Scotland
Isle of Eriska
The first General Manager appointed by the family to their private island. A younger audience, a Michelin ambition, the projects in hand completed, and the estate prepared for succession.
04/Scotland
Brucefield Estate
For a family estate: agricultural diversification through sustainable tourism, heritage restoration, grant funding and a plan for the next generation.
05/Scotland
Dakota Eurocentral
A year's mandate to prepare a local General Manager to take the helm. Along the way, guest relations became a department of its own, and a nursery next door took in our team's children.
At the table
Food, art and the small ceremonies of hospitality.
From the raw ingredient to the finished table.
Materials
Stone, salt and gold leaf. A place is felt in the hand before it is understood.
What belonging is worth
Belonging is not soft. It is measurable.
My thinking is regenerative, borrowed from permaculture: care for the land, care for people, and a fair share returned. A place that gives back more than it takes is simply the better investment.
Social Return on Investment gives a monetary value to what balance sheets tend to miss: the team that stays, the supplier that grows, the neighbour who becomes a regular. Expressed as a ratio of value created to money invested, it sits beside the P&L rather than in place of it.
I have adapted it for hospitality and at civic scale, in two published frameworks: the RHSROI Framework for hospitality (Warwick Business School, 2022) and the Circular Belonging Framework at civic scale (SSRN, 2026).
SSRN paper, cited as A. Krahé SchaefleinRHSROI Framework (Zenodo)
The Owner's Walk
Every engagement begins with one question: what could this place become for the people who use it?
I walk it as a guest, an owner and a member of staff would, in person, because a place must be felt as well as seen. You receive a written account of what it is, what it could become and what stands in the way. The length depends on the place. The fee is fixed, and agreed in advance.
The thread
Thirty years in hotels taught me how belonging is made. Running my own business taught me what it costs. Everything I do now follows that thread.
QANNIK Projects - Advisory
My advisory practice, from heritage estates in Scotland to circular communities in Uganda, and the way to engage me.
TOPOS Intelligence
Land intelligence, before anything is designed or built. Co-founded.
NeuSpace
Social entrepreneurship: repurposing and regenerating assets, from religious houses to schools, wherever they stand. Co-founded.
Sentier de la Maison Foundation
Its mandate: to make belonging a global driver of measurable societal change, with a positive contribution to GDP. Home of the Circular Belonging Framework.
Working together
One chairman I worked for called me Mary Poppins. He asked for the impossible. I reminded him I had no magic wand, then found a way to deliver it, properly.
Some owners need one question answered. Others need someone at the table for years. I come in as chief executive or in another executive appointment, as an interim or fractional Chief Experience Officer, or as an adviser on a defined mandate. It usually begins with The Owner's Walk.
Begin with the place itself.
Begin a conversationIn their words
Anne has brought to life our guest journey...”
Anne is the right person to oversee the launch...”
Anne brings great energy, vigour and creative direction to hotel marketing and photography.”
Her leadership and entrepreneurial approach ... absolutely made a big difference in project delivery and results achieved.”
