November 2000
Penton's Designing Magazine , Premiere issue

Sketches
Talking Trends With A Designer
By Anita L. Degen, ASID

The bar has been raised in hospitality design. Recent years of high volume renovation and new hotel construction have opened the door to new approaches in hotel design. Owners and hotel operators are seeking to set themselves apart from the crowd and give their properties market edge.

A clean room with the basic amenities and an oversized desk will no longer cut it. Today, hotels must offer a lifestyle - a lifestyle shaped by the fashion and commercialism of today's prosperity. Today's guests are smart, savvy and design conscious. They are used to all the fashionable appointments and technological conveniences of home and don't want to give them up when traveling. Lifestyle habits such as working out or checking e-mail in the middle of the night are hard to leave behind. For so many guests, their homes reflect the pages of the latest fashion catalog and feature all the amenities. They expect their hotel to offer more.

Today's influences mirror fashion, graphic design, advertising and media. Lifestyles promoted in advertising blur the line between work and leisure. Traditional 9 to 5 thinking is gone. Technology has set us free. Laptops, the Internet and voice mail allow one the luxury to play first and work later.

Leisure travel combines now with business travel. Today's guest is younger and more affluent than the business traveler of yesteryear. Today's guest works hard and plays hard. Public spaces need to act as the extended living room, meeting place and trendy hot spot all at once. No longer do hotel restaurants offer in-house service alone; they are destination points.

The Color Marketing Group (a global think tank which identifies world market trends) has defined current consumer trends as follows:
A growing dependence on technology.
Strong focus on the home and garden.
A growing concern for the environment.
The pursuit of personal peace - likely a reaction to one's growing dependence on technology.

Translation, please. For hotels, this means offering technological conveniences in the rooms, the use of natural colors and materials with toned-down color pallets and rooms that reflect home fashion trends.

Advancements in materials have given us the opportunity to reflect these trends. We can design for function, maintainability and aesthetics. New synthetic fabrics look and feel just like cotton and silk, yet can be washed without shrinkage or fading in the house laundry. Unlike earlier synthetics, today's colors and textures are such that you might use them at home. When solution dyed fibers became widely used in carpet and textiles, hotel operators loved them for color fastness and chemical resistance, but designers hated the limited color choices and synthetic look. Finally, improved color pallets combined with new techniques that tone down the synthetic quality of the yarns have created a more natural, residential-looking product.

The consumer's focus on the home and pursuits of personal peace have put guest bath design into the spotlight. For many years, guest surveys have indicated the bath to be a room's most important feature. Given the size of a typical room module, designers have been challenged to deliver luxury minus space. We are responding by taking a more residential approach with incandescent lighting, stone vanities, framed mirrors and more stylish looking fixtures. New construction will continue to give over more space to the bathroom - the true sign of comfort and luxury.

Such are current trends. What will they be next year...in two years...or five? For the hotel owner who has better things to do than live in a constant state of renovation, this is the quandary.

For the designer, it's a challenge as well. Interior design has been tempered by the need to be "timeless", while at the other end of the spectrum, "current." The "how to" for this is as individual as each project. There is no three-step guide. It remains the secret of good design and will always be the mark of truly talented designers.

The designer's task is to tap into is what makes the guest tick. The guest's perspective on the world and self is the clue to where they want to stay. Hotel interiors must match the image today's guests want for themselves. Hip or traditional, interiors must ultimately sell lifestyle.

Anita L. Degen is a principal with Seattle-based Degen & Degen, a full-service architecture and interior design firm.