William Kimpton

A force behind Wall Street's move into fast food nearly three decades ago and later the financier for two landmark hotel projects, William Drennon Kimpton is navigating through the '90s as a "seller of sleep," a partner to chefs and a man in search of a cutting-edge concept.

Fond of sweaters and rarely, if ever, sighted in coat and tie since he gave up an investment banking career to "go straight" in 1980, the 59-year-old Kimpton prefers Bill to William and presides over the Kimpton Hotel & Restaurant Group Inc. of San Francisco. His company manages two midsize and 16 "boutique" hotels and 25 restaurants in California, Oregon and Washington.

Most of the properties managed by the Kimpton Group are owned by Kimpton-led partnerships. Some, however, are held by groups in which Kimpton is a minority partner, and a few are the holdings of others who pay the company a management fee. Kimpton declines to disclose his company's revenues or profits but indicates that the properties it manages generate aggregate annual sales of $150 million to $200 million.

A native of Missouri and a summer-vacation farm boy who spent some of his childhood in Chicago, Kimpton worked around dyslexia to earn a degree in economics from Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. His athletic skills kept him interested in school during his youth, helped him avoid some of the unpleasantness of Army basic training when he encountered a base commander interested in fielding a winning baseball team and were instrumental in his being twice crowned champion of the Pacific Coast Men's Squash Tournament.

Robert Patterson, director of hospitality consulting for Coopers & Lybrand in Los Angeles, says that while Kimpton might not have created the boutique-hotel segment, "he advanced the art and did a real nice job of packaging it--especially the foodservice aspects."

The silver-haired hotelier-restaurateur goes out of the way to share credit for his company's wins with its longtime management team, including president Thomas A. LaTour, a former Amfac Hotels senior vice president of administration. He also delights in making literary references.

While explaining why he believes people are interested in his 13-year-old company, he uses the allegory of life as a river encounter expressed in "Siddhartha," by Hermann Hesse.

Success is not the...