Kristin D. Godsey is the Design Group Director for ST Media Group International, overseeing the Hospitality Style, Boutique Design, Package Design and VMSD brands. Having worked in media for almost 20 years, she has experience in just about every facet of magazine and web publishing, working for a range of magazines such as Fortune, Good Housekeeping and Restaurants & Institutions. She's been covering the architecture and design industry for nearly four years, immersing herself in retail and hospitality design trends.
Hospitality Style's brand-new, larger-than-life first print edition of 2010 is finally here. I got my first look at it in all its glossy glory last week, when a box of them arrived in Las Vegas where I was attending GlobalShop, the retail design industry trade show. (Hospitality Style's sister brand, VMSD, covers the retail design market.) My design firm friends at the show were suitably impressed, likening it to a coffee table book and marveling at the beautiful, oversized images that jump off the page.
Want one? Go on over to our subscription page and fill out the simple form. A quarterly subscription is free to qualified design professionals, and I promise, you won't be disappointed. We'll be posting content from the issue soon, so keep an eye on HospitalityStyle.com as well.
Want one? Go on over to our subscription page and fill out the simple form. A quarterly subscription is free to qualified design professionals, and I promise, you won't be disappointed. We'll be posting content from the issue soon, so keep an eye on HospitalityStyle.com as well.
If you want a hotel guestroom that provides the perfect place to rest, go two blocks from Times Square. The hotel renovation challenge that Courtyard by Marriott set for itself in redesigning the guestrooms at its Times Square South location was to shut out all the buzz of one of the world's busiest locations. How'd they do it? Strategic ergonomics, lighting and a bed you can disappear in. Find out more about the hotel here, or just check in and see if you can forget where you are.
When it opened in 1966, the Century Plaza Hotel was the future. The community of Century City, Calif., anchored by the hotel, represented a novel approach to urban planning, and the building's iconic facade signified the best in contemporary hotel design. Although that vision of the future may not have panned out, the icon remained, but it appeared to be on its deathbed when the developer recently announced plans to demolish the structure to make way for mixed-use development. A strong backlash followed, however, led by the L.A. community and the National Trust, and the development plan was changed to preserve the hotel, and a little piece of history survives. Read more here.
Showing us how modern hotel design can lead the way to environmental sustainability, Yountville, California's Bardessono Hotel has become only the third hotel to achieve LEED Platinum status, the highest level of certification. The year-old boutique property employs innovations such as geothermal heating and cooling, reused materials and—especially critical in California—low water use, and it also happens to be beautifully designed. Get more details and see a slideshow here.
In its March issue, coming to newsstands this Friday, Travel + Leisure presents its Design Awards 2010, with some fun results. How nice to see Motel 6, honored as Best Large Hotel for its recent hotel renovation, alongside the highest of high concepts, such as Nomiya (Best Restaurant), a temporary glass box atop a Paris museum accommodating, apparently, exactly one party of twelve. It's a compelling look at the best of a wide swath of design industry work, including travel accessories (even a car). And in the midst of a winter like this one, just a glance at an award-winnning spa design in Miami Beach or resort design in Morocco is sure to give you the travel bug.
Here's a way the hospitality design industry can do a little more to help the devastated nation of Haiti get back on its feet. Lulan Artisans is a groundbreaking company producing design-forward textiles through environmentally sustainable methods in conjunction with artists in underprivileged countries, mostly in Southest Asia. They've also been developing a program in Haiti, providing economic opportunities with fair-trade wages and a community-building mindset, and they're rededicating that effort in the aftermath of the earthquake. Fortunately, Lulan also happens to be running its first-ever design competition, and the winners get to work directly with Haitian and Southest Asian artisans to bring the designs to market. It's a great opportunity for designers to advance their careers and do a little good at the same time. Find out more about Lulan Artisans here.
For those looking for a little stylistic adventure in Paris (Pick me! Pick me!), the new Makassar restaurant and lounge combines a French sensibility with Indonesian-inspired décor (think pewter, red leather, dark woods) and adds a buffet of artistic elements to catch your eye, including wall-projected theater scenes and a gallery of sketches on themes of fashion and film. And the creative direction integrated virtually every element it could, including food styling, uniforms, music and graphic identity. Get more details and see a slew of gorgeous photos here. (And for more on restaurant and night club design, click through this Hospitality Style design gallery.) 
Restaurants attached to celebrity chefs have mostly been the province of TV stars, but that trend is evolving to include A-list chefs whose "celebrity" exists largely within the culinary world. Instead of relying on a name alone for success, however, it helps to aim for something novel in hotel restaurant design, as well. The ANA Intercontinental Hotel in Tokyo is soon to open a new restaurant from chef Pierre Gagnaire, whose restaurants are often named among the best in the world, and its décor will include some exciting work with curves—oval-shaped tables!—to go along with the 36th-floor view of the heart of Tokyo. The opening is in March, and you'll see more upcoming in Hospitality Style.
A venerable old brand is looking fresh again, as Sheraton Hotels and Resorts has just spent a whopping $6 billion on a brand overhaul that includes new designs for more than half of its North American properties. The focus is on blurring the lines between business and leisure travel—the hospitality trend unfortunately dubbed "bleisure"—and one of the highlights of the new Sheraton is a uniquely wired lobby lounge done in partnership with Microsoft. Ninety-eight properties worldwide have been renovated, more than 300 new lobbies have been created, and 70,000 guestrooms (including 50,000 in North America) are new or newly redesigned. And Sheraton, the largest of the Starwood brands, is introducing it all with a $20 million marketing campaign. For more on modern hotel design and resort design trends, check out our gallery at http://www.hospitalitystyle.com/projects/hotels-resorts.
With nearly a month of 2010 behind us, the fog is lifting a bit and we're starting to get a clearer picture of what's ahead for the hospitality industry this year. The consensus from the hotel designers, restaurant designers and spa designers I'm talking to for the March Hospitality Style relaunch is that they're feeling the start of a turnaround. They're not exactly laying in a supply of Dom Perignon, but they are seeing some follow-ups from developers on RFPs.
What's more interesting is what those developers want. The hottest hospitality design trends for projects on firms' boards are about not being trendy at all.
Jim Stapleton, vice president, FRCH Design Worldwide, Cincinnati, predicts design will take a more conservative turn. His reasoning is that lenders and investors aren't going to turn over the mountains of capital needed to hire a Frank Gehry or Santiago Calatrava. Nor are they going to risk investing in a torquing tower that might turn into a money drain as R&D problems drive up the bills. "You're going to see a lot more boxes," he says. But, they'll be better boxes, in his view. New materials give the look for less, so why not apply a Topshop or H+M mentality to guestroom design, restaurant design, even spas?
For more inspiration on the latest, see the galleries on our site.
Okay, if you are active in hotel renovation or hotel design, you know 2009 was a bad one for U.S. hotels. Thanks to research firm STR, anyone in the hospitality design industry can now attach some specific numbers to the magnitude of that downturn. Here are the stats from STR: revenue per available room (RevPAR) fell 16.7 percent, to $53.71, for the year; occupancy fell 8.7 percent, to 55.1 percent; and the average daily rate (ADR) dropped 8.8 percent, to $97.51.
“Good riddance to 2009, a year which we believe will go down as the worst in the modern hotel industry,” said STR president Mark Lomanno. “The combination of a distressed economy in conjunction with panic pricing drove RevPARs down to levels that were virtually incomprehensible just a year and a half ago. I look for a significant improvement in the key hotel performance indicators in 2010.”
For more on which U.S. markets suffered the least in this challenging environment, click here.
This article -- titled "Architect, or Whatever" -- in today's New York Times should be of some small comfort to the new population of recession victims in the design industry. Over the past year, we've heard from too great a number of talented hospitality designers (some young, some not, some with a humbling amount of amazing experience) who've lost their jobs in this economy. And just this week, I've been going back and forth with a designer who lost her full-time firm position, a terrific person with a great resume who was writing an article on how to stay motivated when you begin a freelance practice. At the last minute, she was getting cold feet about mentioning that she was laid off.
But articles like the NYT piece serve as a reminder that there's no real stigma to that status these days. I like this quote, in particular, from the article: “You think you’re in charge of your profession, and then the recession hits and you realize that your career is market driven. It’s forced me to push myself and become more individual. My motto is don’t say no to anything.”
But articles like the NYT piece serve as a reminder that there's no real stigma to that status these days. I like this quote, in particular, from the article: “You think you’re in charge of your profession, and then the recession hits and you realize that your career is market driven. It’s forced me to push myself and become more individual. My motto is don’t say no to anything.”
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