Down to a fine art

It may sound odd in our boutique-built world, but the most popular hotels were once those that lacked a sense of place. Rather, they were properties that offered you the same quality of service, the same crisp sheets, the same cocktails in the bar, whether you’d just landed in Bombay or Berlin. They were buildings that could steer you, with a gloved hand and a smile, away from unfamiliar local customs and towards the comforts of home. The most admired hotels were once places like the Hilton. When the world’s first chain began in 1949, the firm’s eponymous founder promised his guests breathtaking uniformity everywhere from bookings to room service. As Conrad Hilton put it with characteristic bluntness: “Each of our hotels is a little America.”

These days, hospitality has moved well away from this model. The watchword on the industry’s lips, even for conglomerates like Hilton, is ‘personalisation’.

No longer can owners and designers insulate customers from the sights and smells of the outside world. On the contrary, hoteliers are increasingly keen to tug that culture through the lobby doors, using art to conjure atmospheres that speak to the deep history and customs of a particular place.

And why not? At a time when 81% of guests want local experiences when they check in, according to a report commissioned by hospitality technology company, Alice. And when that sense of personalisation can boost a hotel’s revenue by 6%, as found by Qubit, it makes sense to design a property with specificity in mind. Yet, if this is the aspiration, the execution is far from simple. To drag a property from initial press release to final opening requires careful planning, as well as thoughtful collaboration between designers, owners and operators. It relies on partnerships with artists both near and far, and it needs a sharp, farreaching vision of what a property is trying to achieve.

Get it wrong and the consequences can be dire; both for the reputation of the owner and the sanity of their accountants. But get it right – by investing in design that keeps its value both financially and aesthetically – and the rewards will come, now and long into the future.

Spying great design

Few people are better placed to appreciate the recent shifts in hotel design ethos than Tina Norden. German by birth, she’s spent over two decades at Conran and Partners in London, helping design some of the most elegant and iconic hospitality spots on the planet. Now a partner and in her 25th year on the job – plus prestigious awards like The Brit List’s Interior Designer of the Year 2021 under her belt – Norden has plenty to reflect on. And as she explains, much has changed from those monochrome days of “little American” Hiltons. “I think it’s more specific, it’s more informed by the client base,” she says. “When you look at what a lot of the hotel operators do – when they look at their brands – they’re very specific about the target audience, they’re very specific about who they’re aiming at”.

The reasons for these moves aren’t hard to appreciate. Perhaps the most important, suggests Norden, is the question of competition. In a city like New York, which as recently as 2019 saw 19,000 hotel rooms slated for opening, owners and operators are having to battle to differentiate their offerings. Broader cultural changes are doubtless important here too.

“Guests, developers and owners are more educated nowadays,” says Accor’s Anne Becker Olins. The European luxury senior vice president of design and technical services explains this gives more space for the intelligent showcasing of interesting artwork. Also underlying this is, presumably, the glimmer of a more globalised world. While a traveller in 1970 may have wanted little more than cool beer and a hamburger, the proliferation of new foods and cheap flights has encouraged hotels to promote more site-specific styles.

It goes without saying, meanwhile, that these aesthetic developments are sparking major shifts in how properties are designed. A case in point is the Old War Office. Sprawled across an Edwardian palace off Whitehall in London, the OWO Residences by Raffles, as its new Anglo-Indian owners have rebranded it, is a bewildering testament to the building’s bureaucratic past.

James Bond author Ian Fleming once worked here – as the Aston Martin sculpture in the bar evokes. Winston Churchill was based here during the Blitz – the property’s new portrait gallery reminds passing guests. The basic point, stresses Becker Olins, whose employer ultimately owns Raffles, is straightforward enough. “You start by using the existing space,” she says, “and then when it comes to the interior design, and the way space is used, that is driven by the former use of the building.”

 The art of the matter

If you visit the South Place Hotel in London, it may initially look like any other trendy European property. Sitting on the outskirts of the City of London, not far from the Barbican, its aesthetic is what you would expect for a hotel only an IPA-throw away from Shoreditch. Comfy designer armchairs mingle with herringbone floors and thick marble worktops.

Listen to Norden, however, and it soon becomes clear that this is intricately designed to create an overriding sense of belonging. “We always start with the concept for the project,” she explains, “and the design of the room or the space. And we usually start by engaging with the art in that space very early on.”

The importance of subtlety does not stop there. For that Austin Martin sculpture to feel like it has always belonged over the bar, everything from the location to the lighting to the fittings of pieces must be vigorously planned far in advance. For Becker Olins, trying to distinguish between the art hanging on the wall without considering what lies outside its frame, is basically futile. Instead, she argues for a situation where something as straightforward as the “material on a wall” can become a crucial design element.

81%
The percentage of guests that want local experiences when they check in to a hotel.
Alice

In practice, that typically means designers and owners must work hard to find precisely the right partners for the job, even if that means searching far from home. Once again, the OWO offers a good case study here, with Becker Olins explaining how her team hired a group of Czech glassmakers to build bespoke sculptures for the hotel.

As far as specific works of art are concerned, what increasingly matters is less the fame or extravagance of a particular piece, and more how it fits into the overall atmosphere. At the South Place Hotel, for instance, all the prints on the walls are taken from artists living within the M25. “It wants to be local,” Norden emphasises. “It wants to be something that has a meaning to the place”.

Even more strikingly, many of these paintings were done by students, as opposed to fully-fledged professionals. Apart from saving money overall, Norden adds that this approach allows boutique-level uniqueness even in a hotel with hundreds of rooms. Of course, not even experienced designers could hope to source all this artwork themselves. Rather, Becker Olins explains, Accor – the company behind the recent revival of the Orient Express – liaises with art consultants to find particular appropriate paintings, what Norden characterises as “frameworks” as opposed to hard-and-fast contracts.

Substance over style

Not that landmark artwork is necessarily gone for good. For one thing, both experts agree that a thoughtful investment can not only bring curious guests (and their Instagrams) to a property, it can also help an owner recoup some of their investment should a hotel ultimately have to close its doors.

As Norden puts it: “It will hopefully be there for a very long time to come and be a valuable asset for the client.” The key to this longevity, she continues, is a mantra that she’s repeated across her long career: putting style over fashion. “Fashion is something that’s very much of the moment, something that’s exciting, that changes all the time,” she explains. “For me, style is something much more long term”.

This is a wise distinction. For if the bland, universal design conventions of Hilton have been consigned to history, there is evidence that attitudes are shifting even further. That’s true, for example, when it comes to sustainability. “Art in the future can convey your values,” Becker Olins says, noting the rising concerns around an artist’s use of materials, or how far they ship their masterworks, means a new kind of aesthetic minimalism may become increasingly important.

Norden, for her part, comes to similar conclusions, albeit from a slightly different angle. With lobbies increasingly becoming surrogate co-working spots, she advocates for less dramatic, distracting artworks and argues that pieces should probably be ones that “people can work and live and be around”. We may not be returning to a million little Americas, but perhaps to a world where properties are a tad less loud.