Jonathan Riff

Jonathan Riff Is a brand architect, experience designer, author and hotelier, who helps brands & individuals Connect commerce with culture.

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When the tourists leave - Available now.

Designers Jonathan Riff and Megan Horney were building great careers when they dropped everything. Newly in love and freshly bewitched by Croatia, they quit their full-on LA lives in search of faraway adventure. Thousands followed online as they packed up, grabbed their dog Sailor and made the break for the former Eastern Bloc nation.

Over five months in 2016, they completely transformed a run-down old Communist Party meeting house in a little village. With the odds firmly against them, the outsiders created The Admiral - one of Croatia’s most beautiful boutique coastal hotels. As word spread, tourists from around the world arrived in the little fishing village of Zaton to fill its rooms.

For three years, visitors told of the easy luxury, of the accomplished cuisine, of the wonderful trips around the divine islands off the Dalmatian coast. And when Jonathan and Megan invited American friends and family to a charming olive grove near the village to witness their marriage, everything seemed perfect.

Yet, behind the scenes, they had always been unsure about the intentions of some around them. They knew their investments within the building were being closely followed, that their success was being tracked. They did not know that the old bayside meeting house, honored by Yugoslavian dictator Josip Tito in 1953, amounted to capital in an ongoing legal dispute. What they did know was that when The Admiral had never looked better and never been busier, it went under the hammer.

The building they were renting, with plans in place to purchase, had never been truly in the gift of the listed owner. The Americans, wrongfooted by misinformation, had no choice but to fight. They borrowed as much as possible from as far and wide as they could, arranged for an agent to bid for them. One of their rivals would be a regular and wealthy guest at the hotel. Another emerged out of nowhere on the very day of the sale.

As the bidding war took off and the figures soared skywards, Jonathan and Megan knew they could not afford what they had created. It was while they were on their honeymoon that they learned they had lost all hope of ever owning the hotel. With a whole year to run on their rental contract, they were told to carry on as before yet advised of nothing else.

But as the season came to a close, as the arrival of their baby was imminent, the new owner stopped communicating. They were instructed by lawyers to vacate The Admiral, to leave everything in place, to never return. And, due to a clause on their contract, it got worse. Tens of thousands of dollars were taken from their bank account by a previous owner. In a stroke, the new parents were left homeless, with no access to money, without work or legal recourse. A message from the new owner stated simply: “I will pray for you.”

Angry and confused, they had no choice but to make plans to return to the USA with their little boy, Roko, and Sailor. But they would not go empty-handed. Against legal advice and while fully aware of the demand for them to leave and lock up, Jonathan and Megan Riff flung open the doors of The Admiral one last time. They spread the word around the village that absolutely everything inside was for sale, that they would not be leaving until the place was bare. All that they had brought to the building was sold to local people. And loyal staff members, upset at how things had turned out, were gifted pieces of The Admiral to remind them of their time there.

In When The Tourists Leave, they consider the bitter and bruising shut down of what they had hoped would be a lifetime in Croatia. Their story tells of their passion for the country, of how a land and its people cast a spell over them which they would never shake. It’s a story of joy, humor, exhaustion, elation, rage, success and of the infuriating bureaucracy, mistrust and corruption which at times bedevils life in Croatia.

As it charts their journey, it delves into the outworkings of the independence war which took such a heavy toll on the nation in the 1990s and into the mindsets it has left behind. But most of all, it is a story of a couple who fell in love with each other, fell in love Croatia and fell in love with the astonishing creation they named The Admiral.

Now, almost two years since their irrational ejection from the hotel, it remains boarded up, its future unknown, its five-star reviews all done. When The Tourists Leave is the all-too-true story of what happened to two people who did what so many others fear to do - to break free, to take a chance and chase a dream.

FOLLOW THE JOURNEY

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#NewBabyJoy #BabyGirl #Prou

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Never drop anchor, always keep exploring.

“The future belongs to a different kind of person with a different kind of mind: artists, inventors, storytellers-creative and holistic ‘right-brain’ thinkers whose abilities mark the fault line between who gets ahead and who doesn’t”