As a senior executive for luxury design brands like Carl Hansen & Søn and Vitra, Melissa Shelton had a hard time with business travel. Forced to choose between well-designed but impersonal hotels or poorly conceived rentals, she longed for an option that could merge the two: the style and comfort of luxury lodging with the intimacy of a private residence. Slowly, an idea took shape, and when Covid hit, she decided to leave her high-paying corporate career and purchase a historic Victorian home in her native New Orleans, with the goal of renovating it for bookings to design junkies like herself. The seed for Dear Valentine was planted. Nearly six years later, Shelton’s short-term rental network now includes 10 properties.
From the very beginning, Shelton wanted to do more than just create well-designed Airbnbs. When she purchased that first property—Shelton calls it “Bouligny” for its location in the Uptown neighborhood once known as Faubourg Bouligny—she set out to renovate the home in the manner of a showhouse, with the strategic brand partnerships and cross-promotion that come along with it. “I felt like there was an opportunity for a more experiential shopping moment with pieces that you wouldn’t normally experience in a hotel or rental,” she says. “It’s more like design storytelling.”
And because New Orleans offers a historic preservation program bolstered by the state and federal government, she was able to dive into the design without devoting her life savings to the endeavor. The properties provided quirky backdrops for the kind of curating that showhouses are known for, from interesting architectural details and moody layered textures to inspiring assemblages of patterns and colors. Dear Valentine homes aren’t optimized for high traffic; they’re calibrated for deep connection. And Shelton stocks them with a mix of new pieces and commercial lodging dealbreakers like antique furnishings and high-maintenance fabrics (“We’re constantly brushing our velvet sofas with velvet brushes,” she says with a laugh) for a look that feels like home.
The idea was starting to gain momentum when the unexpected happened: A millworker Shelton was contracting to work on Bouligny heard her concept and wanted in. He had a historic property in the bohemian Bywater neighborhood and put her in charge of renovating it. Then he introduced her to another homeowner investor, who requested the same. So Shelton put Bouligny on the back burner and structured a unique partnership deal. Investors in Dear Valentine continue to own their properties outright, but pay for the renovation costs plus maintenance and repairs, while Shelton acts as a consultant, guiding them through the historic preservation process and connecting them with designers and products from relevant brands. Once the renovations are complete, she shifts into an operating partner role, taking on the costs of marketing the properties for rental under the Dear Valentine brand.
Shelton’s design world background helped grease the wheels: Her relationships and familiarity with the industry made it easy to approach brands for a mutually beneficial collaboration. The brands would provide the product, usually for a negotiated discount (though sometimes through sponsored donation), and she would provide something of equal or perhaps even greater value: high-resolution photography, styled by interior designers and shot by an artfully minded photographer.
“The big national brands like Benjamin Moore immediately got it,” says Shelton. “Producing a photo shoot can be very expensive: finding a location, renting a location, building it out. If you’re a tile or paint company, to get in situ photography is a big endeavor,” she explains. “Then we do cross-marketing with the photography and include [vendors] in our design information, and share our partner directory with guests so they can learn more or purchase from them.”
For brands, the benefit of inclusion allows consumers to interact with them in a more personal setting than a store. “Partnerships like this are meaningful because they place our products in highly curated, design-forward environments where guests can experience them as they’re intended, within a complete aesthetic vision,” says Virginia Guillian of British heritage hardware brand Lefroy Brooks. “It’s not just product placement; it’s storytelling through environment. Each property feels intentional, layered and deeply personal. The collaboration felt authentic and strategically aligned, rather than experimental for the sake of it.”
Allison Audrey Weldon, the founder and CEO of botanical skin care brand Sangre de Fruta, adds: “It’s a wonderful way for folks to experience our products in person (the scent, the texture, the ritual) and not just on a shelf. It’s experiential marketing at its best.”
Dear Valentine’s strategic partnership model has also proven successful with other types of collaborators, including interior designers, contractors and preservation specialists. Shelton frequently works with local companies, including Logan Killen Interiors and Southkick Historic Preservation. Through Dear Valentine, Shelton has become a connector—providing investors with a network of vetted industry professionals; designers with a direct project pipeline; and design-savvy travelers with a portal to discover design in a uniquely intimate setting.
After completing two investor projects last fall, Shelton returned to finish the Bouligny property, launching it on Airbnb and Vrbo late last year to increase visibility as Dear Valentine makes a name for itself. “Ideally we’d have all guests book through our website to give us more direct communication with the guest, but it’s a good marketing platform for us to get our initial guests, and just expand the eyes on the properties and build credibility with the reviews,” she explains.
In the meantime, Shelton is working on introducing additional investor partnership models and identifying a new city to fold into the Dear Valentine portfolio, preferably with a waterfront focus. “Our goal is to create environments that are for design-minded guests by design-minded people,” she shares, adding that she’s building properties that she and her aesthetically curious collaborators would want to stay in. “It’s all about the moments of discovery,” she says “We want there to be a surprise at every turn.”
