Birth of a brand: First look at Home2's Oasis lobby, rooms

MEMPHIS—Check into Room 513 at the Shady Grove/Memphis Hampton Inn & Suites and you’ll get quite the surprise. Instead of a typical Hampton room, you’ll find a studio suite with a long working wall, kitchenette, bed and sofabed, funky lime-green highlights and a partial drape for partitioning the room. No, this isn’t a radically different new look for Hampton, it’s the guestroom prototype for Hilton’s new Home2 Suites brand.

Hilton constructs a variety of model rooms for Hampton, Embassy Suites and Home2 at the Shady Grove location, a few short miles from its Memphis Operations Center.

The Home2 studio suite room, at 323 square feet, is a model of efficiency, with clean lines and no clutter, which Homewood Suites & Home2 Suites by Hilton VP of brand performance support Dawn Koenig said adds to a feeling of cleanliness.

Designed by Cincinnati-based FRCH Design Worldwide, the room has three different color schemes, three wood grain color options and enough flexibility for what Koenig called “controlled choice.”

Central to the room is the so-called working wall. The wall’s modular design allows for easy assembly on site. What’s more, any pieces that wear or are damaged can easily be replaced, key for the ownership groups. From a design perspective, the wall helps focus the guestroom into three zones: kitchen, living/work and bedroom.

Building the room and testing it out—with focus groups, Hampton guests and franchisees—has allowed Hilton to evolve the design and tweak the concept. For example, corkboard behind the working wall was a main design element early on—but in practice, the team realized there were a variety of issues that came up, including how difficult it was for local contractors to accurately cut the cork to fit properly.
“We thought we could put our in-suite [information] up there, allow the guest to put things up there, but all we’re doing is introducing sharp points,” Koenig said. “[We found out] it’s just not easy to cut cork. And if you think about on-site maintenance and people having to replace that, there’s a very good chance that it’s not going to look how we’d like it to.”

The first Oasis
The current economic malaise has been a mixed blessing for Home2. Hilton has signed 62 locations for the brand—and also has received approval to start developing in Canada and Mexico. But with financing such a struggle, only one location is currently under construction—a Fayetteville, N.C., property, slated for a late-2010 opening.

Home2 decided to take the prototype idea one step past the guestroom and actually built out a full-sized replica of the “Oasis” lobby concept right in the midst of in their Memphis Operations Center.

Hilton estimates that between 75 and 100 potential franchisees have visited the test spaces. Additionally, a range of people—from focus groups to Hilton IT employees to local college students—have come through the lobby.

Koenig said the Home2 team has been open to modifying the design where it made sense. Franchisees have come into the space and pointed out operational issues—recycling bins that are too heavy for associates, louvers that will catch dust, white chairs that will make maintenance a nightmare, slots in a picnic table that collect all sorts of dirt and dust. Synthetic grass that adorned the top of the lobby’s banquette—initially planned to be sort of a brand identifier—was phased out, due to the cost ($1,500) and concerns over cleaning.

While much of the design for Home2 was aimed to appeal to female Generation Y travelers, Bill Duncan, global head, brand management, Homewood Suites & Home2 Suites by Hilton, said feedback has shown that both younger and older consumers, male and female, are impressed.

“Strong design can cross generational lines,” Duncan said. “This is very eclectic, but it’s also soothing.”