Hotel design, planning, and development is more dynamic than ever before. From large event spaces to coworking havens, hotel management teams have even more guests and experiences they are looking to satisfy — creating a vital need to re envision how these spaces interplay with one another.
Hotel wellness centers, conference halls, restaurants, bars, and shops have transformed lobbies and reception areas from check-in spaces to high-traffic hubs. The right design will not only facilitate these new functional spaces but also enhance the guest experience overall.
In this article, we’ll explore how smart hotel interior design can elevate the guest experience and help facilities make better use of their communal spaces.
1. A Strong First Impression
It takes less than a second for our brains to form a first impression. Website and booking experience aside, hotel lobbies are often the first physical touch point a guest has with hospitality brands. Design is no replacement for excellent customer service, clean facilities, and a smooth check-in process, but it can do much of the heavy lifting when cultivating an atmosphere, and memorable experience.
So, what makes for a good first impression with today’s consumers? The answer depends on your project’s target clientele, but we’ve noticed a few common throughlines in our partnerships with hospitality designers, architects, and contractors:
- Draw inspiration from the local community. Locally sourced furniture, decorations, or other customizations add a special touch that can differentiate this stay experience from any other.
- Consider auditory and visual privacy. Lobbies are where weary travelers will need to check in, but they also serve as central hubs for the comings and goings of all of your guests. A running water feature, for example, contributes to calming, natural undertones within a large space, but the running water can also produce white noise that muffles background noise. Lobby partitions are another way to hamper visual and auditory stimuli during the check-in process.
- Adorn with creative and comfortable furniture. Hotels must adapt to meet modern customer expectations. Lobby furnishings are no exception. As you specify furniture, evaluate it for multiple use cases — conference attendees holding a private phone conversation, remote workers finishing their day outside their room, and guests who arrive before check-in time.
2. Partitioning Prefunction Spaces
Beyond the lobby comes prefunction spaces — or the transitory areas that lead into your ballrooms, conference centers, and other main event spaces.
Prefunction spaces pose several unique design challenges:
- First, they must adapt for several use cases, including event registration, networking, event catering, and more.
- Second, they are some of the highest-trafficked areas, meaning that designs must contribute to traffic flow.
- And third, they are a “connective” space between the hotel’s lobby area, dining room and bar, event halls, and guest lodgings, and as such must flow design sensibilities from one space to the next.
Renewed, post-COVID growth in the event industry (which experienced a $1.52 billion bump in valuation between 2021 and 2022 alone) has many hoteliers considering how they can tap into more dynamic floor plans and arrangements to accommodate different gatherings of all sizes and statures.
To that end, a well-placed sliding room divider solution is a highly pliant design feature that can sharply define neighboring areas within larger event spaces, articulate traffic flow, and adjust to meet the demands of specific events. Larger events, for example, may need to use the prefunction area’s square footage as part of their primary gathering space. Alternatively, hotel management can easily stow away, providing more common spaces for guests to enjoy.
3. Multi-Functional for Multi-Purpose
The hospitality industry has witnessed a diversification of use cases over the last several decades.
It’s not uncommon for hotels — boutique and larger — to include some or all of the following common areas:
- Restaurants, bars, and private dining
- Sitting and work areas
- Experiential communal centers
- Spas and pools
- Boutique or essentials shops
- Boardrooms, meeting rooms, and large event spaces
- Fitness centers
Compared to ground and lobby floor plans from the last century, today’s hotel shared spaces have noticeably more amenities and activities they are facilitating, but the divisions between each space have also become much less compartmentalized. In her article for Hospitality Net, Carla Neimann — Senior Vice President of Design & Architecture, Premier — explains this fundamental shift best:
“To address this complexity, designers should conceive of the lobby as a multi-functional canvas. Instead of a one-size-fits-all layout, they should strategically carve out distinct zones within the lobby, each purposefully designed to cater to specific guest activities. These zones might encompass areas for lounging, dining, working, and socializing.”
Carla Neimann — Senior Vice President of Design & Architecture, Premier
4. Cohesive Design Elements
As we just covered, versatility and multi-functionality are essential hospitality design principles, but they cannot come at the expense of togetherness, unity, and functionality. As shared spaces take on multiple functionalities, smart design can help end users understand where one space ends and another begins and the roles that each area is intended to serve.
Our recent project within the senior and assisted living sector is an example of design cohesion that can apply just as easily to hotel lobby and prefunction projects. Our contribution to THW Design’s social hub redesign — which included a central lounge, dining, and bar area — was a custom operable sliding wall to help demarcate individual sections of the larger community space.
Our operable wall helped tie the design together in two key ways:
- While in use, the operable wall system clearly indicated the border of the room. However, the clear panel design meant that no space felt fully detached from the rest of the community center.
- Our customized, laser-cut inserts were designed to play into the THW Design’s overall vision for the project: to “bring the outdoors in.” The textured wood inserts are complemented by an organic, branching pattern that provides a sense of wellness and connection to nature.
5. A One-of-a-Kind Guest Experiences
Themed hotels are perhaps the most overt example of design creating a one-of-a-kind stay for guests, elevating overall brand identity, and fostering brand evangelism. But your design does not need to present that boldly to make a lasting impression on travelers.
A trend growing in this direction is “experiential design,” which focuses on creating spaces and environments that emphasize human experience just as much as they prioritize utility. Event spaces, for example, may be vibrantly transformed from drab, boxy spaces to rooms that energize attendees, encourage networking and mingling, and make for a more memorable occasion.
Our custom interior doors and walls, as an example, are one-way hospitality designers can incorporate stunning statement pieces that also serve a very practical purpose in dividing large common areas. See examples of our previous work in our catalog:
6. Natural, Wellness-Centered Design Elements
Top voices in the interior design industry have been anticipating a departure from the minimalism of modern design, instead prioritizing layouts and features that evoke occupant wellness and the natural landscape — especially for luxury hotel brands, where delivering a best-in-class experience is requisite. This shift is reflected in the growing trend of biophilic design, which integrates natural elements into indoor environments to create spaces that are not only aesthetically pleasing but also promote physical and mental well-being.
To that effect, incorporating elements such as natural light, indoor plants, and water features can significantly enhance the atmosphere of a hotel lobby or reception area. Large windows that allow for abundant daylight and views of nature can create a more inviting and relaxing environment for guests. The presence of greenery, whether through living walls or strategically placed plants, can improve air quality and provide a calming influence.
Wellness-centered experiences are a core tenet of our own design philosophy. To learn how you can improve the health, safety, and wellness of your next project, register for our CEU.
7. Adaptable Toward What Comes Next
The reasons why guests choose to stay at hotels are in constant flux:
- Leisure travel has rebounded from its pandemic hiatus and is likely to grow, including within the solo traveler category and with millennials who have the resources for luxury accommodations.
- With 4 out of 5 Americans in the workforce willing to work from a hotel room, the work-from-hotel boom has brought renewed investments in smart hotel experiences.
- Consumer behavior continues to prioritize travel arrangements that are better for the planet, which presents exciting opportunities for designers and architects who can incorporate more sustainable materials and development practices. Nearly 80% of travelers reported that they intended to stay at least once in an eco-friendly accommodation in 2022, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
At the same time, guest satisfaction scores have decreased during the past few years, suggesting that hotel management teams are struggling to adapt their strategies and facilities to meet these new benchmarks.
We may not be able to anticipate what the next chapter of hotel design looks like, but creating spaces today that are flexible will allow hotels to more immediately and sufficiently satisfy evolving guest expectations.
Create Inviting Hotel Lobby Interiors With the Room Division Experts
Adopting a more flexible room design doesn’t have to be a difficult transition. As the experts in creating multi-functional, multi-purpose rooms, our design consultants have helped countless hospitality designers and architects rethink how they can make the best use of their square footage by using sliding doors and walls.
Take a look at our hospitality solutions if you’d like to learn more. Or, get in touch with our team to discuss your next project.