Hotel design is the discipline concerned with the creation of an environment in which guests can be welcomed and provided with facilities for rest, relaxation and respite from their travels or workaday cares in return for payment to their host. As such the designer is providing the hotelier with the tools to do his job. By value Hotel Design may only cost 15% of the budget for creating an hotel

Hotel

A hotel is an establishment that provides paid lodging on a short-term basis. The provision of basic accommodation, in times past, consisting only of a room with a bed, a cupboard, a small table and a washstand has largely been replaced by rooms with modern facilities, including en-suite bathrooms...

 but it is said it can leverage up to 70% of the revenue by the creation of an attractive interior experience.

Cultural Influences

Hotel designers bring to their work their own cultural mores and need to understand the culture in which the hotel will operate if working outside their native environment. With the internationalisation of travellers the links with local traditions in many hotel designs have been weakened and ‘International’ has become a style in its own right, often denoting the bland and inoffensive. This in turn has caused a reaction in many operators and guests who have sought out hotels with a vernacular local traditional style or created hotels where the design has been more linked to modernist stylistic tendencies of elites, the latter characterised by the boutique hotel. Stylistic influences of modern design are wide and shared through television and the web leading to a wide range of diverse stylistic exercises in hotel interiors from ‘grunge’ to ‘classical’.

Yet the design of such buildings has become more focussed so the ‘rules’ governing their functionality have become more defined leading to the development of specialist knowledge in an expert cadre of hotel designers. Such knowledge ranges from the mundane, such as the appropriate height for bed head light switches to the more specialist, such as the right layout for a kitchen

Kitchen

A kitchen is a room or part of a room used for cooking and food preparation.In the West, a modern residential kitchen is typically equipped with a stove, a sink with hot and cold running water, a refrigerator and kitchen cabinets arranged according to a modular design. Many households have a...

or the sightlines from reception to enable control and protection of entry to rooms. The pace of change has, as in most areas of modern life, speeded up with the development of innovative technology, which also affects such design yet whether ‘International’, ‘grunge’, ‘boutique’ or ‘urban’ such design rules need to be applied in all hotels.

The parameters for success appear immutable. The Hotel still has to provide a welcome and an environment that supports the comfort of the guest, the provision or respite, rest and relaxation from the demands of a noisy and increasingly crowded society.