Boutique hoteliers long have sought to create a home-away-from-home feel at their hotels.
Now bigger hotels are jumping on the bandwagon, trying to achieve the comfy residential or hip lifestyle feel increasingly demanded by travelers.
“The cookie-cutter mold is out,” said Stacy Shoemaker, senior editor for Hospitality Design magazine in New York.
Shoemaker said hotels today are open with higher ceilings, more windows, larger and more open bathrooms, bigger guest rooms and public areas that encourage work, socializing or light meals.
“Owners are beginning to realize that the hotel needs to be one experience and have a design flow,” she said.
That design might include the sleek lines of Starwood’s W Hotels or the newer Tower23 in San Diego, or it might try to capture a balance between traditional and contemporary, like the newly remodeled Ritz-Carlton Laguna Niguel.
San Francisco-based Kimpton Hotel & Restaurant Group Inc.,a mainstay of the boutique genre,combines modern and traditional with contemporary public spaces. It used color and patterns to achieve a comfortable style in the guestrooms at its newest location, the Hotel Solamar in San Diego.
Many designers aim for a hotel that’s residential in tone and reflects the geography or culture of the area.
“For 60 years, we’ve tried to incorporate local culture and history in our hotels,” said Howard J. Wolff, senior vice president of architectural firm Wimberly, Allison, Tong & Goo in Hawaii. “Now it’s a trend, too.”
Custom touches often include tables near the entryway, dressing areas near the bathrooms, lots of lighting and enough storage space to avoid living out of a suitcase.
But it’s also reflected in locally inspired themes such as Pete Mallory’s Surf City Grill at the Hyatt Regency Huntington Beach Resort & Spa or the local art incorporated into Montage Resort & Spa in Laguna Beach, according to Raj Chandrani, director of strategic planning for Wimberly’s Newport Beach office.
For Marriott International Inc., local stonework, art or even cuisine is used to establish the theme, said Teri Urovsky, vice president of interior design.
Marriott also aims to make public areas more inviting.
“We’re trying to get guests out of their rooms to use all the space in public areas,” Urovsky said.
These efforts go beyond upscale room extras that started the hotel industry’s evolution into what they call “lifestyle centers.”
In 1999 Westin Hotels introduced its luxurious Heav-enly Bed. Now, every hotel company touts its special beds and linens,and many sell them to guests.
Some guests can even copy favorite hotel decor at home. Kimpton has introduced a Web site and in-room KimptonStyle catalog that David Sussman, vice president of hotel development and design, said “allows the guest to mimic the Kimpton style” at home.
From beds, hotels moved into the bathroom, introducing designer bath amenities, launching their own brands and turning a simple shower into an experience with special shower heads, curved shower curtain rails and larger shower spaces.
Today, the amenity wars have evolved to competition in fitness centers and spas, considered a key part of any large modern hotel.
No longer is the fitness center just a glorified suite with a few treadmills or stationary bikes. Now it’s a lifestyle center designed as much for the social aspect as the physical, with Westin Workout fitness centers,such as the one in Costa Mesa,on the leading edge of the trend.
“Consumer research shows that the size of the fitness center can (be a factor) in the choice of hotels,” Wimberly’s Chandrani said.
The next trend, he said, is so-called wellness centers.
Wimberly is working on a Four Seasons in Westlake Village and the expanded Miraval spa in Tucson.
The Four Seasons hotel and spa will connect to a 750,000-square-foot wellness center campus being built by Dole Food Co.
A budding trend that’s gaining steam in the U.S. is the environmentally friendly green hotel that does more than ask guests to reuse towels and sheets.
Toronto-based Fairmont Hotels & Resorts, which took over management of Sutton Place Hotel in Newport Beach last week after San Clemente-based Sunstone Hotel Investors Inc. closed its buy of the hotel, is known in Canada for its environmental programs.
Fairmont plans to form an onsite Green Team made up of volunteers from all departments to create environmentally friendly programs at the hotel.
