Family Style

A mother and daughter bring two distinct design aesthetics to a Costa Rican hotel

- Jess Swanson

SOME MOTHERS AND daughters enjoy shopping together. Others prefer afternoon tea. But Elizabeth Steinvorth and her daughter, Elena Rohrmoser, settled on the ultimate mother-daughter project: to turn Hotel Aguas Claras, an aging property in Costa Rica, into an ecologically minded, luxury boutique hotel. “We had never run a hotel before in our lives,” says Rohrmoser, “and had no real hospitality experience apart from loving to travel, and loving to travel together.”

The pair had been visiting Puerto Viejo, on the country’s Caribbean coast, for more than 30 years. Back then, Rohrmoser was just a baby, and there weren’t streetlights or plumbing. But there was something simple and exquisite in the way the sandy beaches touched the lush rain forest. “We wanted to share this beautiful place with the world,” Steinvorth says.

In 2016, Steinvorth, a multimedia artist based in the country’s capital, San José, purchased the property with the intention of showcasing her floral watercolor paintings, bright mosaics and other artworks. Around this time, her daughter, who had studied art history, fashion and marketing, graduated and moved back to Costa Rica to join her mother during the hotel renovation. But they soon learned that, at least in their case, the interior design apple did fall far from the tree: Rohrmoser’s vision for the hotel was more modern and whimsical, whereas Steinvorth’s was classic and Victorian.