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She’s the Realist. He’s the Dreamer. Together, They Built a Hotel.
Vocabolo Moscatelli co-founder Catharina “Cathi” Lütjens on building a hotel with her husband, dividing the work, learning to compromise and why every couple in business needs somewhere they can simply “go home.”
Catharina “Cathi” Lütjens and her husband, Frederik Kubierschky, did things in an order that, in retrospect, seems unusually sensible for a couple who would eventually build a hotel together.
They started as colleagues. The two met while working at Park Hyatt Zurich, and Cathi says they quickly discovered they were a good team. The relationship came later. Years after that, following careers in European luxury hospitality, they decided to test that teamwork on a considerably larger scale: restoring an abandoned 12th-century monastery in the Umbrian countryside and turning it into their own hotel.
Today, Vocabolo Moscatelli is a 12-room hideaway near Umbertide, close to the Tuscan border. It is intimate, highly personal and built around the kind of hospitality Cathi and Frederik wanted to experience themselves. One guest gave Cathi perhaps the best description of it: “your best friend’s hip country house.”
It is also the product of a marriage, a business partnership and several years of figuring out when to dream, when to be practical and how to compromise when two strong opinions don’t quite align. “I definitely know that I could not do this with anyone else,” Cathi says.
Hospitality was always in the family
Cathi grew up in Freiburg, near Germany’s Black Forest, in a family with hospitality in its DNA. Her grandmother’s side ran a fine-food catering business, and she started helping while she was still at school. “I always enjoyed being a host,” she says, whether that meant creating something special for clients, friends or family.
Her formal hospitality education came through an apprenticeship at Grand Hyatt Berlin, where she rotated through departments across the hotel. The experience still shapes how she leads today. She worked everywhere from housekeeping to the kitchen and learned firsthand how much work sits behind a seamless guest experience.
“It helps me really to understand how important every single department is, to make the magic happen,” she says.
From Berlin she moved to Park Hyatt Zurich, where she met Frederik, followed by a role on the opening team at Park Hyatt Vienna. Later, working in private aviation gave her an entirely different perspective. Suddenly, she was the client, organising complex travel and relying on hotels to deliver what she needed.
Too often, she says, “you are just a number.” It taught her what she didn’t want hospitality to feel like and why building genuine relationships with partners matters.
“We figured out that we are a good team”
Cathi and Frederik had both spent years in corporate luxury hospitality when the idea of creating something of their own began to take hold. “We simply had a strong desire to create our own small, little world,” she says. “Somewhere where we could bring our own understanding of hospitality to life.”
Their goal was straightforward: create the hotel they themselves would want to visit.
The property, Cathi says, almost found them. An investor believed in the project and the site became available at auction. Nature had largely taken over. “There was an auction. Not so romantic,” she laughs.
What followed took around three and a half years, including roughly a year and a half navigating paperwork and another year and a half restoring the property. For Italy, Cathi says, that was actually pretty fast.
They were building a hotel, but they were also creating an entirely new way of working together. “Everything is built on a very unique level of trust,” Cathi says. “It really is the foundation of everything we do together.”
She’s the realist. He’s the dreamer.
Trust does not mean agreement.
Cathi laughs that she and Frederik are still learning how to run their first project together, including one lesson that sounds obvious until your spouse is also your business partner: separate the responsibilities. Cathi oversees sales, marketing, PR, communications and guest experiences. She is also deeply involved in the small things, earning herself a nickname from Frederik: “the manager of details.”
Their personalities are different too. “I would say I’m more the realistic person, while Frederik is the dreamer,” she says.
They have also developed one important rule: whatever is happening in their private life stays outside the hotel. “When we are at Vocabolo, we are business partners first,” Cathi says. “Whatever is happening personally stays outside the door, and we focus on what needs to be done.”
“The business needs its own space and personal matters shouldn’t influence our decisions. For us, the work always comes first when we are at Vocabolo,” she says, adding that this clarity has actually made their life together easier.
And when they disagree professionally, there is no magic formula. “We usually discuss it until one of us eventually gives in,” Cathi says. “We often say, ‘the wiser one gives in.’”
She admits giving in is still not her greatest strength, but they have learned that some things simply are not worth creating tension over. “Sometimes being right is less important than keeping the peace between us,” she says. Ultimately, they both want the same thing: to make the right decision for Vocabolo without letting the business come between them.
Don’t confuse building the dream with living the dream
There is an Instagram version of opening a boutique hotel in Umbria with your husband. Cathi is refreshingly uninterested in selling it.
“Yes, on one hand, we are living the dream,” she says. “But on the other hand, it is not always maybe as glamorous as it may look from the outside.”
Building something from scratch takes time, patience and a strong belief in what you are creating. Her advice is to resist becoming distracted by what everyone else is doing. “If you really believe in what you are building, you have to stay committed to it, even when it’s getting difficult from time to time.”
There is another complication when your co-founder is also your husband: work has a habit of following you everywhere.
Work doesn’t magically stop when you go home
For the first year, Cathi and Frederik did not even have a home separate from the hotel. They lived out of suitcases, moving from room to room depending on availability.
It turned out to be excellent product research. You can walk into a room ten times, Cathi says, but you notice different things when you actually sleep in the bed or use the bath. Still, after about a year, she had had enough of the suitcases.
“I told Fred, okay, I think I would like to unpack finally.”
They eventually found a house nearby, and something as simple as leaving the property acquired new significance. “It really helps at one point to also be able to say, ‘Okay, let’s go home.’”
That doesn’t mean the business automatically stays behind. Cathi admits she is often the one who wants to keep talking about work late into the evening, once things are finally quiet. During the day, she says, they often don’t even have enough time to discuss everything that needs attention.
Frederik is the one reminding her that late at night may not be the best moment to keep going. “And of course, he’s not wrong about that,” she says.
Cathi actually likes the quiet productivity of the evening. But this, too, has become part of the compromise: “Sometimes the work can wait until tomorrow, and our time together needs to come first.”
Keep something that belongs to the two of you
Cathi is careful not to pretend they have mastered the separation between work and life. Vocabolo Moscatelli is still a young business. They like being present. They like hosting. A team that began with seven people has grown to around 30, including part-time and seasonal staff, but the two founders remain very much part of the daily life of the hotel.
What they have learned is the importance of making space for themselves outside it. “We have both learned that it’s also very important to take some time for yourself and to also take some time as a couple to not lose yourself in that journey.”
Cathi tries to begin her mornings with coffee and a walk with their dogs before she opens her laptop. “It does not always work out,” she admits.
Perhaps that is the most realistic version of work-life balance: knowing what helps, even if you don’t manage it every day.
So, should you start a business with your partner?
For Cathi, building Vocabolo with Frederik has been worth the complications.
“For me, it is honestly one of the most beautiful things I could have ever dreamed of,” she says.
But before another couple follows their lead, she thinks there are some questions worth asking: Are you genuinely working toward the same goal? Are you both equally willing to take the leap? What are you prepared to give up or change along the way?
And then there is perhaps the most revealing test of all: “Can we still enjoy each other’s company after talking about the business all day?”
Working together changes a relationship, she says. A couple needs a strong enough foundation to withstand pressure, difficult decisions and the inevitable ups and downs of running a business side by side. But it can also give you something unusual.
“You get to build something together that is truly yours,” Cathi says. “And that, for me, makes all the challenges worth it.”
Building Vocabolo has also strengthened their relationship in ways she didn’t necessarily expect. They have been through stress and difficult moments together, but also shared the excitement, pride and happiness that come with watching something they created take shape.
“We understand each other’s pressures in a way that I think would be difficult if we were not doing this together,” she says. And working so closely has forced them to understand their differences, too.
“It has made us more patient with each other and taught us when to push, when to listen and, sometimes, when to simply let the other person be right.”
“The entire world will come”
When Cathi first arrived in this quiet corner of Umbria, the self-described city girl looked around and had a fairly practical question: What were they going to do out here?
Frederik was less concerned. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “You will see. The entire world will come and visit us.”
Guests now arrive from Italy, the DACH markets, the U.S., Canada and beyond. Some spend their days exploring Umbria. Others arrive exhausted after Rome or Florence and barely leave the property, settling into the pool, the countryside and the hotel’s all-day breakfast.
Frederik, it turns out, was right.
Perhaps that is the advantage of building a business with someone you love whose instincts are different from your own. Sometimes the realist keeps the dream grounded, and sometimes the dreamer sees what is coming before anyone else does.
