What a museum taught me about hospitality
Over the Christmas holiday, Amy and I took the girls to New York City for a visit to the American Girl Place—a pilgrimage for them—and to the Museum of Modern Art for us, where we spent time with the Ruth Asawa exhibition (which was thoroughly amazing).
MoMA is, of course, an extraordinary institution—the gold standard of a design-forward experience. Everything is considered: how you move through the space, what you encounter, how long you linger, how your body feels while you’re there. It’s colorful and welcoming and interactive, and every visit leaves me inspired, usually with a few new ideas for how we do things at Snowfort.
But even the best-run places show you who they are when something small goes wrong.
At one point, I took a wrong turn trying to get back to our kids and found myself needing to re-enter a paid gallery area. I didn’t have my ticket—Amy had it—and there’s no cell service inside MoMA to text or call. The staff member I spoke with wasn’t rude, exactly, but he was immovable. “I need some kind of ticket,” he kept repeating, hands in the air, blank look, as if discretion simply didn’t exist.
I ended up taking a different elevator and entered the gallery another way—without being asked for a ticket at all—as if that’s the MoMA design principle. Problem solved, practically speaking. But the moment stuck in my craw. Not because I was inconvenienced, but because the interaction felt out of sync with the rest of the institution. A place so deeply invested in design, flow, and human experience suddenly felt bureaucratic and distrustful.
That contrast clarified something important for me. At Snowfort, we try very hard never to make someone re-prove that they belong. I’ve told the people who run the register for us that if something comes up, like a book isn’t in the system, or doesn’t have a price, or something glitches—just let the customer take it. We’ll figure it out later, at their convenience. It’s not that the customer is always right, it’s that we want them to remember having had an amazing, smooth experience. Friendliness and trust first. Systems second.
This philosophy was modeled for me years ago by the poet Kate Greenstreet. After a reading, I asked if I could buy her book with a credit card. Her husband, who was running the table, said they could do me one better—he wrote down their address and asked me to mail a check when I got around to it. That moment has stayed with me ever since.
Design isn’t just how things look or work when everything goes right. It’s how we behave when something goes a little wrong. That’s the version of hospitality—and trust—we’re always aiming for at Snowfort.