The Software We Left Behind

After the Revolution, Omidreza Kazemi says, the structure remained. The buildings stayed. The Hilton in Isfahan, the big hotels in Tehran — the hardware was all there. What disappeared was the software: the managers, the mindset, the accumulated knowledge of how to actually run a modern hospitality operation. And what was left behind was a country that found itself sitting inside a spaceship, not entirely sure how to pilot it.

That image — inherited hardware, absent software, a generation learning to fly — is the quiet center of this episode of Cozy Corner with Hossein Nasiri. Omidreza Kazemi, business development consultant in the hospitality and tourism industry, researcher, and cultural activist, is one of the most thoughtful observers of what has been happening in Iran’s hospitality landscape over the past decade. In this conversation, he traces it all the way back — to the Pahlavi era, to the first boutique hotel in Nain in the 1960s, to a vocational high school modeled on Swiss hotel schools, to the moment everything changed again.

Seeds Planted Long Before the Bloom

When Hossein describes noticing, over the past ten to twelve years, that something has been shifting in Iranian travel, food, and hospitality — that friends returning from abroad keep saying how different things feel — Omidreza agrees without hesitation. But he pushes the timeline back much further than expected.

The roots of what we are seeing today, he argues, go all the way back to the 1960s and 1970s, when tourism began to take shape as an actual industry in Iran. The Shiraz Arts Festival, the restoration work in Isfahan driven by local pride and civic identity, the figure of Keyvan Khosrovani — who established the first traditional-style lodging in Nain in the 1960s, designed after a historic local house — all of these were early signals. The soil was being prepared long before anything grew visibly from it.

Then came the interruption. After the Revolution and the long years of war, the connection was severed. Tourism became marginal, even taboo. The foreign managers left. The institutional knowledge that had been accumulating quietly disappeared. What remained was a generation that had learned to describe the shadow of something it had never directly seen.

Describing the Shadow of the Elephant

This is one of the most striking images in the conversation. Omidreza describes how, in the years following the Revolution, Iranian hospitality professionals found themselves in a kind of Platonic situation: trying to understand a system from its shadow rather than the thing itself. They learned the French method of service. They memorized which side to serve from and which side to clear from. They trained rigorously in standards that had been designed for a completely different context.

And then they went to work and found that the table was pushed against the wall.

“The problem,” he says, “is that we tend to standardize things that aren’t meant to be standardized.”

The standards imported from abroad were designed to be replicated across controlled environments. But boutique hotels, by their very nature, resist standardization. They are creative, conceptual, context-dependent. You cannot define a fixed standard for something whose entire value lies in being unlike everything else. The irony, Omidreza notes, is that the big chain hotels — the very ones the boutique movement was reacting against — ended up buying the original boutique hotels once they realized what those smaller operators had understood.

Etiquette Is Not Principles

One of the most intellectually rich passages of the conversation is Omidreza’s distinction between etiquette and principles — a distinction that goes to the heart of why Iranian hospitality has always been something different from service.

Principles, he explains, are fixed. They are the non-negotiables — the floor below which a service operation should not fall. Etiquette, on the other hand, is relational. It depends on who I am and who the person in front of me is. It is interactive, agile, human. And crucially, it cannot be taught through instruction alone.

“Etiquette must be cultivated,” he says. “It cannot be dictated. You must plant it in time, learn it through interaction, and experience it through companionship.”

This is why, he argues, the Iranian tradition of hospitality — with its shahneshin rooms, its biruni courtyards, its culture of never eating alone, its deep sense that the host’s dignity is expressed not through service but through shared presence — cannot simply be imported into a hotel management framework. The framework was built for a different kind of relationship between host and guest. In the Iranian version, the host does not serve; the host accompanies.

The Hotel Management Vocational School

One of the episode’s most surprising moments is Omidreza’s account of the hotel management vocational high schools that emerged in Iran in the mid-1990s — a detail that most people, including Hossein, had no idea existed. Founded under the Foundation of the Oppressed, which managed many of Iran’s major hotels, these schools were modeled directly on Swiss hotel training institutions. They had admission interviews. They rejected candidates with the wrong temperament. They were, for their time, among the most expensive vocational schools in Tehran.

Omidreza enrolled in 2000. His teachers had worked in Iranian hotels during the Pahlavi era — they had experienced the original standards firsthand, and then spent fifteen or twenty years updating and adapting them. They were, in a sense, the bridge generation: people who had seen both worlds and were trying to pass something of both across to a new cohort.

The attrition rate was high. Less than half of his classmates stayed in the industry. But the ones who did, he says, became genuinely influential. The generation that came through that school — and the generation that learned from them — is the generation that has been quietly transforming Iranian hospitality over the past decade.

The Ameri House and the Lights Coming On

Omidreza spent years managing the Saraye Ameriha in Kashan — one of the largest historic houses still standing in Iran, at eleven thousand square meters, with seven courtyards. It had been saved from demolition in the 1990s as part of a preservation movement that was, at the time, primarily about survival rather than tourism. The idea of turning historic houses into functioning boutique hotels came later, organically, as the discourse shifted and the culture around historic fabric began to change.

He describes the early days of the Ameri House as genuinely uncertain. He didn’t dare go up to the rooftop without a security guard. The surrounding neighborhood had emptied of its original residents. Roofs had collapsed. The streets felt unsafe at night.

By 2015 or 2016, everything had changed. Guests — including female travelers — were walking through the old quarter until three in the morning without concern. The lights were on in the historic buildings. The lavash bakery at the corner started thinking about higher income. The rosewater shop next door found new customers. Young tour guides began to see their work as a serious profession rather than a side activity.

“When one light came on,” he says, “it helped someone else see something. And they turned on their own light.”

Cultural Digestion — The Story of the Milk and Sugar

The conversation reaches its most philosophical register when Omidreza and Hossein discuss what makes Iranian cultural adaptation different — and why the things Iran has absorbed from the outside world tend to become genuinely Iranian rather than pale imitations of their source.

Omidreza tells a story about the Parsis of India — Zoroastrian Iranians who migrated to the subcontinent centuries ago and were initially unwelcome. When they asked for permission to stay, the local ruler sent them a vessel of milk filled to the brim, meaning: there is no room. The Iranians dissolved sugar into the milk and sent it back. We will make it sweeter, they said, and you will not even notice how.

That, he says, is the Iranian approach to encountering the new. Not rejection. Not blind imitation. Something closer to cultural digestion — taking in what comes, transforming it in the stomach of the culture, and producing something that is no longer quite what it was when it arrived. It is why Iranian macaroni bears little resemblance to Italian pasta. It is why the coffee culture that arrived in Iran a decade ago has become something Iranians have made entirely their own. And it is why the boutique hotel, a concept that originated in New York and San Francisco in the 1980s, looks and feels like something different when it exists in a restored Qajar-era courtyard in Kashan.

Why the Movement Is Sustainable

Near the end of the conversation, Hossein asks the question that hangs over everything: is this sustainable? Given economic uncertainty, given volatility, given the conditions under which these businesses operate — can what has been built actually last?

Omidreza’s answer is specific. The reason it is sustainable, he says, is that the best of these projects are not hotels. They are homes. The people running the historic house in Shiraz are from Shiraz. The people keeping the lights on in Kashan are from Kashan. When a friend of his returned from abroad, came back to Birjand, and revived his ancestral house and garden — that is not a business investment in the conventional sense. It is a person returning to something that was always theirs.

“The key to our lasting legacy,” he says, “is that this is no longer just a guesthouse — it’s their home. They’re familiar with it. They belong to it.”

This, he suggests, is what makes the current moment different from the Pahlavi era, when the development of tourism was state-led, centralized, and dependent on foreign expertise. What is happening now is local, private, rooted in the specific culture of each city and each neighborhood. It cannot be easily replicated elsewhere — but it does not need to be. Its value is precisely in being itself.

A Cozy Corner in the Morning

When Hossein asks Omidreza where his cozy corner is — when he experiences the most creative version of himself — the answer reflects everything the episode has been building toward. He describes two states. The broader one: a kind of revelation that arrives in the darkest moments, when he has reached a dead end and suddenly there is movement, a breakthrough. The routine one: every morning, between six-thirty and ten, he grinds his coffee, opens a book, and gives himself three or four hours of complete inwardness — no social media, no external input. Only reading, writing, and the cup in his hand.

It is, in its way, a small version of what he has been describing all episode: the importance of preparing the ground, of giving things time, of resisting the pressure to produce before the cultivation is complete.

A Dedication

Omidreza dedicates this conversation to his parents — and to Mahnoush, his wife. His father was the one who, in 1999, brought home a piece of paper about a hotel management high school and told a middle schooler he thought it had a good future. In a culture where working in service was not considered prestigious, that act of open-mindedness and foresight set everything in motion.

And Mahnoush — who stood beside him eight years ago when he left a stable management position in Kashan to pursue something that did not yet have a name or a business model. Without that support, he says simply, he would not be sitting here.