A couple months back I received a new hardback book that sent me into a tropical reverie. A reverie so replete with top-shelf memories and vibes that the conversation I'm sharing below slipped into the subconscious... only to reappear now.

The book featured one of the great world destinations, a property so unique and so ego-less that its equivalent simply doesn't exist. We're talking, of course, about Jamaica's Rockhouse.

You see, for the past fifty years, the iconic Rockhouse Hotel has hosted various A-list guests on its property in the cove of Negril, Jamaica, but not just influential modern names like Emily Ratajkowski and Meghan Markle, but icons like Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones, among countless others.

You don't become a favorite of folks like those mentioned above by offering some sort of elevated pampering or privacy, though. You do so through soul. You do so by integrating into the natural ecology in the west of Jamaica without incident, as if designed by technic shifts, weather patterns, the passing of millions of years.

And that soul doesn't cease at the guest experience. Owner Paul Salmon's commitment to preserving the legacy of the property and its care for the community is evidenced in the Rockhouse Foundation, which focuses much of its efforts on aiding the Jamaican education system and has done some truly impressive work.

All of this experience, this kindness, these vibes are memorialized into the new hardback, which commemorates 50 years of rocking the house.

Rockhouse: The Book, further includes anecdotes of past guests, their commitment to preserving the property's environment, and pictures from over the years of the property as it evolved.

I caught up with Mr. Salmon on the challenges of bringing this unique tome to life, the evolution of today's hotel guest, and how we might define legacy.

‍The journey speaks for itself when you compile a tome as such, but I'm curious: what was unexpected, or where were some unseen challenges and kind of putting this together?

Having never written a book before, well—not that I literally wrote the book— but having done a project like this before, it's a lot, right?  Like, I guess you start out with the thought that, like, how hard could this be? And as you get into the project, you become more committed to giving each portion its proper life, and making sure that you're doing the best job you can to communicate effectively, and it's a lot. We put a pretty good team together. We got a good art director. We worked with Brigid Washington, who helped to sort of storyline the whole thing in a way that I think made a lot of sense. And then Summer Eldemire did a good chunk of the writing. And then Jasmine Pierce and Max Glazer helped to oversee the production of it.

I mean, you're talking to someone that puts together a print publication every couple of months. It's a lot of work, in short.

It's monumental. I got a better insight into what you must be going through. At least what you do, do you know what I mean? But you want to give the story the support that you feel it deserves and do it justice in the book format—it definitely was more challenging than I thought it would be. But also great. I learned so much about the hotel as well, and the deep dive of going through all of these things too.

If you had to pick an image inside that you feel, you know consummates, you know your journey with the property, which is decades deep now, what what might it be?

Wow. It's tricky, right? Because there's so many great images in the book, and I really thought about that. Obviously there's the double page—the sort of huts on the water that really sort of encompasses, I think, the vibe of Rockhouse.

There's a great one that was actually shot, you know, by Perry Henzell, who made The Harder They Come. And he did a single to that movie back in 1973 and he did this sort of aerial, and it's kind of an undeveloped sort of version of Rockhouse. If you were to do that same shot today, it would still feel very organic, you know what I mean?

It is very much of the land, which I think was very in keeping with the original architecture of ethos. I think if you look at those two pictures together, which are sort of landscapes of the parks on the cliff in different stages, it very much talks to the nature of the Rockhouse being of the land. I'm quite proud of our work on that.

I think philanthropy or community engagement is one of those aspects of culture where, perhaps comparable perhaps to your looking at a print publication and not realizing every square inch of work that goes into bringing it to lif—that's really challenging. With all the engagement with the Jamaican community that Rockhouse has accomplished over the years, what's something that you feel you've really learned about yourself?

I think the biggest thing—this kind of goes with running a hotel for 30 years, but not really coming from the hotel business or in the philanthropy piece of it as well— the biggest thing is that incremental steps can get you to where you're trying to go. It's not trying to do everything at once, it's just like, How can I have a positive impact with that, with this, with this next project, how can we make that happen? How can we build on that and grow?

I think we had a sort of a big picture idea about supporting education in Western Jamaica. If you take really solid, incremental steps, some of those are missteps too, right? You learn from those, and you kind of back up, and you kind of take some more steps further with a better, you know, better informed. I think particularly with the work of the Foundation—we were lucky enough to have Peter Rose as a partner in that and he worked in that field, you know, in New York, and in education and philanthropy, and he was able to help guide us, not only with the process of building but also with making sure we're building what's needed by the community that we're managing, that that we're managing the politics, and working with the Ministry of Education, as well as obviously raising the money. There's a lot of pieces to that part. I think listening to people who know much better than me is really important too. And working out ways to support them.

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Jumping subjects to one embraced by the property... the psychedelic push here in the States has had considerable gains and acceptances, especially on the West Coast where I'm based, but not in everyone's mind... so I'm curious, has embracing psychedelic culture alienated any clientele?

It's not something that any visitor has to do, right? I think Jamaica, particularly, has always had this history of magic mushrooms from the 70s, from the hippies, the sort of crew that populated the place back in the 70s, and they've been local spots that have been selling magic mushrooms forever there. Obviously, Jamaica is one of the few countries in the world where psilocybin has never been made illegal. It's always been legal. And so, particularly coming out of COVID, we kind of wanted to rethink our activities program a little bit. Psilocybin came more into the mainstream with some new suppliers and it made sense.

Obviously, during COVID, we sort of shut down yoga classes and all these kind of activities that we used to do: painting glasses and African drumming and things like this, or Caribbean dance. We started to see some of them were more popular and less popular. We started to rethink the program around changing interests and ideas. While traveling, I've done a couple of sound baths, you know, I tried psilocybin a few different times, and sort of came up with this idea. We kind of developed this idea of the psilocybin sound bath. It's a very small micro dose that we offer. It's more just, you know, offering people who probably haven't had the opportunity to try psilocybin and sort of a way to experience it without sort of going full on or overboard, not being in a situation where you’re at risk, or that people are going to kind of have too much and have a really massive reaction, but they might get a bit of an altered reality, and hopefully that might unlock some neural pathways or whatever, and different sort of pieces of themselves.

So, it's not even mandatory doing the sound bath that you have to take the psilocybin—some people come over and just do the sound bath because it's a great, immersive experience. We built this in our organic farm. We built this massive farmhouse that can take up to about 40 yoga mats in a room. We have a rotating group of percussion based or acoustic based musicians that come every Sunday and run this session on a Sunday morning for a couple of hours. We have a couple of people that lead it as well. People have really embraced it as a relatively safe way to try an exposure to psilocybin in a very nurturing and supportive environment that's quite orchestrated.

With regards to changes in programming, that comes with changes in what people need and want from a hotel stay. What changes are you observing?

I think definitely the guest is looking to not just stay within the four walls, necessarily, as they might have historically, and be a bit more adventurous. They’re much more into, I would say, experiencing the food, seeing the place, going and visiting waterfalls, or getting out on the water, or getting outside and meeting Jamaicans.

I mean, that's something we've always encouraged, at Rockhouse and Skylark [the sister hotel property in Negril], but I think that bodes well for the industry.

I would say that's central to Jamaica. I think some of us had a very robust winter last year… I think the numbers overall were pretty stable, but certainly not the kind of rush that, you know, Europe has experienced post-COVID. And I think Jamaica's product has been growing and evolving. I think the fact that these all-inclusives have really dominated the industry in Jamaica, there's interest in alternative options too. But there's good airlift out of the States, and there is a reasonably trained workforce in hospitality. Because it's the biggest industry, there's also  an awareness that it's important to the country, and creates a lot of jobs, not only directly, but indirectly, for suppliers and whatnot.

Beyond behaviors, what about the profile of your visitor? Has that changed?

I don't think the profile of our traveler has changed a lot. But there have been changes. I think generally we're often getting people who are coming from their job, you know, they're on vacation, but they're still in work mode. And I think the fact that there's a bit of a blurring between what's work mode and vacation, you know, because people are much more mobile, maybe they're working and taking a week away. Maybe they're on vacation, but still an obligation to work. There's a real blurring of that. We see some of that culture affecting people's ability to relax. That's huge. But I think that's a change, a bit of a shift that you see working with their laptops in the lounge or whatever. Five, ten years ago, people were coming away and on vacation, right?

You know, whenever I go to Rockhouse, I have to take copious notes of what I'm observing in the first 24 to 48 hours. Because by the time 48 hours passes, I sort of stop noticing. You know what I mean? Because you kind of get seduced by the air and the water. You often find people, when they arrive, they are all hung up about:  I'm in this room. How do I get into that better room for the same category? I'm really upset about this or that, and often, a couple of days later, they're coming back saying, I'm really sorry about that guy I was two days ago. They've really kind of let a lot of that go, and we still see that happening. You know that people transform and really chill.

That's so nice. Last question: how do you Paul Salmon define legacy?

It's interesting, because I would have said I was a bit young to think about this. Like I'm old, but I'm not that old. I got young kids, you know, I'm not really in the legacy mode, right? And obviously, we've only owned Rockhouse for 30 years, even though it's 50 years old. It back-dates us by an extra 20 years. But definitely, writing the book has made me think about that sort of timeline and impact that you have. It certainly made me think more about the experience of being at the hotel, you know, not just for our guests, but for our team, for my family. How you create those positive vibes, and how you think in a more orchestrated way, in a way that's not  ike today's strategy. We've always had a pretty strong underpinning philosophy, and thought about how to evolve the product. For example, the last few years, we've put a lot of effort into organic and hydroponic farming on the property, and that's been a big sort of focus.

Any business needs to make a profit. But Rockhouse has never been a place that is strictly about that. It's always been a place that we really wanted to be proud of the evolution of what it was, and that it stood for something about who we were as a team, particularly as foreigners coming into Jamaica. I think you find that at a micro level in Jamaica, whether it's the person that needs a stiff drink at the end of the day, or whether it's the team member that you see their career grow, or the guests that you see unwind over the course of the day... that's what's important.

But when you think about staff that have worked for you for 25 years, you know, that have gone from being a junior person to owning a home or owning a car and have seen their lives sort of change, you start to think about what's possible. In terms of legacy, it's about how to grow those sort of impacts.  And I I think we don't need to age the idea. I think when you've created an exceptional brand that has a pretty evolved value system, that presents a lot of legacy and promise.

The project to do the 50 years book moved this forward: how do I articulate a lot of those pieces, not just through my own voice, but through others' voices? It's been a lot of fun, a lot of work but actually also really engaging. It was a fun experience going through it.