Aytan Litwin, founder and CEO of White Space, works closely with designers and architects and the factories that produce their furniture, case goods and lighting fixtures so clients — such as hospitality brands including Disney, The Ritz-Carlton and The Luxury Collection — receive the designed spaces they want.
As a result, Litwin and his firm have a close-up view of what trends are making their way into hotel design. Here, Litwin shares four top hotel design trends for 2019.
Trend 1: Lobbies Serving as Co-Working Spaces
“The co-working element is working well everywhere. Walls are being broken down, and the floorplans are being filled with modular, moveable and sharable furniture. Co-working depends on flexibility, so a big trend is constant reconfiguration. There’s an increasing amount of categorical cross-over. Even full-on business hotels are taking cues from WeWork and becoming blended spaces that encourage both socialization and collaboration.
Just look at the Kimpton Hotel Monaco in Denver: It bears many of the earmarks of a traditional business hotel (such as tons of meeting spaces and a central location near the city’s largest convention center), but it also houses an award-winning Italian restaurant and encourages guests to explore the city in their free time by providing them with rental bicycles.”
Trend 2: Scenery Shift
“People want to reinvent their nano-environments and change the scenery, even a little bit. For example, we’ve been fielding a lot of requests for smart workstations that embed integrated wireless phone chargers into tabletops. This allows them to change their view constantly, so they can be both comfortable and engaged with their jobs. It also changes the way we look at the workspace: We start to think of it as one huge charging station. The tables are invisibly wired together to keep the number of electric cords to a minimum, so it’s efficient both practically and aesthetically.”
Trend 3: Marie Kondo on Steroids
“We’re calling it ‘efficient elegance,’ or ‘Marie Kondo (author of ‘The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up’) on Steroids.’ Micro-hotels are the ones at the forefront of this trend, innovating creative ways to build in extra storage and whimsical, charming design features into an ever-shrinking box.
There’s also a wonderful sense of novelty and surprise: What ‘dead’ space has yet to be cleverly colonized? They’re living proof of how narrow constraints can be inspiring, and how necessity is the mother of invention, as their designers force themselves to elegantly finesse more and more amenities into constantly contracting environments.”
I see this trend — and micro-hotels in general — gaining more steam. This is a product of several factors. Our cities are getting more crowded, and we’re getting used to living in smaller spaces, so travelers won’t feel like they’re sacrificing anything by staying in a relatively tiny room.
Plus, millennials have a different sense of value. They don’t buy CDs or Blu-ray Discs; Apple Music and iTunes are cheaper and more efficient. Millennials are spontaneous, often agnostic to hotel brands and are addicted to the Hotels Tonight app.
Micro-hotels allow the industry to remain competitive in many different senses.”
Trend 4: Instagrammable Spaces Are a Given
“There’s an Instagram arms race, and I don’t see any treaties being signed soon. That means the ante has been raised in terms of uniqueness, novelty and visual power. If there is a single phrase I would use to describe what it takes to be ‘Instagrammable,’ I’d say a hotel or resort needs to be ‘wickedly unexpected.’
Companies know that if their properties aren’t Instagrammable, they are missing an opportunity to turn guests into visual evangelists. It’s a lost revenue opportunity.
But [in terms of being Instagrammable], there are clear design dog whistles: attention to detail, polished execution and exquisite finishing. All you need to do is look at Instagram and see how the millennial eye seizes on the perfectly rendered details in its feeds to understand what a hospitality client means when they start asking for these kinds of details.”
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