Thoughtful design can impact well-being, promoting the health and happiness of hotel guests. In this informative panel discussion from Hotec Design, held at the PGA National Resort in Palm Beach Gardens, Fla., in mid-June, hospitality design experts gathered over lunch to discuss how design can customize the guest experience.
“Wellness is very personal, and something that, especially since the pandemic, has really evolved,” noted Miriam Tamayo, director, design and planning lifestyle brands - Latin America & Caribbean, Hyatt Hotels. “It's no longer just a spa space or the fitness center; wellness is something that we really try to weave in through all the spaces, all the touch points in our hotels. For us, wellness is something that is not one-size-fits-all.”
Along those same lines, Chris Sommers, partner and co-founder of Harken Interiors in Chicago, said that rejuvenation and refreshment is different for each person. “Having the hotel understand its ethos and its brand is very important, because each person looks at things differently.” While introverts need to refocus and recharge by spending time alone, extroverts maybe just want to be surrounded by others and they're refreshed by that. “Having a hotel brand understand its ethos and having the designer understand that is really important,” he said, and providing spaces that offer respite and a chance to reset is a collaboration between the hotel and the designer.
Let There Be Light
One way to differentiate one space from another is with light. Lighting accentuates design and, most importantly, noted Mara Villegas, co-founder and principal at Within Light Studio, “makes people feel great.” Villegas shared that natural light and the connection to the exterior is very important for all of us as humans. Lighting design ensures that spaces have natural light in addition to electric lighting inside the space that is balanced with the exterior lighting.
“Light transforms throughout the day to support our circadian rhythm,” she said. Ushering people through those natural rhythms is one critical way that lighting supports wellness. Increased natural lighting and brighter interior lights increase energy, while dimmer lighting promotes restfulness and calm. And certainly, there’s a balance to strike.
“I feel like in general in hotels, guestrooms are underlit,” Villegas noted. “We want to make sure we can also see what we're doing. If we want to iron our dress, [we need to] see the wrinkles. If we want to work, make sure we can work... In hospitality, we also have people from all ages, so we have to make sure that there's enough lighting for all ages to be able to do what they need to do.”
“It's not just having enough lighting. It's also having adjustability,” Tamayo added, saying that you can be sharing the room with someone, and you may each have different preferences. Villegas concurred, saying that from the guests’ perspective, low lightning options and ones as bright as they would like allows each person to customize their experience to what they need or what they want.
The Design Journey
But hospitality design doesn’t start in the guestroom. Kona Gray, landscape architect and principal with EDSA, said it begins the moment a guest sets foot on property. “One of the things we always try to do is give [guests] an opportunity when they reach a property to decompress, to take a moment to go through the forest to see the arrival, to look through the building and see water or see a very amazing mountain view. These are a little design tricks that we've known for years, and they try to implement them as much as we possibly can because we know these little cues allow us to sort of, ‘Hansel and Gretel’— to give people little clues along the way to get to where they want to be in their journey.”
Sommers sang the praises of a Middle Eastern hotel he had stayed in recently, sharing that the typical transactional check-in approach was nowhere to be found there, and that the decompression began immediately because of the “escape” experience that began the moment he set foot on the property. As a designer, he said he was inspired to think about how “we can control that journey from start to finish on all paths of the hotel, designing spaces for front-of-house but also, we have to think of how the staff is going to do this and be seen or not be seen and things like that. So it's really kind of full-picture.”
Villegas said that lighting enhances that journey. “It’s not only about highlighting the beautiful materials that are [part of] a beautiful design, but really, how do we want people to feel in the spaces, because lighting has a very powerful but very subtle effect in our psychology and the way we behave.”
From the brand perspective, Tamayo said wellness design is not something that you can take and just multiply and replicate. “It's not a prototype that you can just repeat on every brand, so we really work with ownership and the design team to understand what the market demand is. Just because you don't have a spa doesn't mean you don't have wellness infused into the project.”
She mentioned at one Costa Rican property, the chef has been working with local farmers and local fisheries, and that everything he's serving at the restaurant right now is locally sourced. “Andaz Papagayo even has a farm now, and all the vegetables are sourced from the property grounds. Wellness includes touches like that.” She added that regionalizing wellness personalizes each property in unique, locale-specific ways.
Tamayo noted that what often gets overlooked in design is the hotel staff—wellness doesn't stop just with the front of the house. “We have an entire team of colleagues that live and breathe at the property, so how do we design spaces that support their well-being? How do we design the bed frame, for example; the same person is going to make beds every day, 20 times a day, so how do you design something that is going to be as easy as possible for them to do it?”
Sommers agreed that wellness encompasses “a full look at a whole spectrum—front-of-house, back-of-house, and all of those things. It's really about how we support the experiences [and the guests’] journey through that. It's not about this Instagrammable moment, it’s more about your journey from the guest room to the treatment room, how do you flow from there?” Having the design be subtle enough in some spaces to make the experience the focal point is key to a nuanced design.
“Wellness is really about enjoying your life, right?” Gray asked the audience. “We have limited time on this planet. We want to have fun, we want to enjoy being with people we love and doing work that we enjoy. And there's just something important about that, infusing well-being into [spaces] holistically… It's all your senses… of smell. It's sound. You know, all these things that make you feel right. It's about feeling. It's really about what you do to help people enjoy living and being better.”