How an office tower turns into a hotel, floor by floor
From a Midtown Manhattan filing to a wave of conversions in Nashville, the mechanics of turning desks into guest rooms are more involved than a coat of paint.
Peter AlmeidaHospitality
Hospitality covers hotels, resorts and short-stay properties as buildings and as businesses. Room design, lobby circulation and material wear sit beside occupancy figures, nightly rates and the local rules governing rentals. Written for operators, developers and designers deciding where money goes before a property opens its doors.
Hotels, resorts and short-stay homes read two ways at once: the design of a room, and the occupancy and rate math that keeps doors open.
Lobby scent, and the materials that make memory
Hotels engineer smell as carefully as lighting — signature scents and chosen materials are the parts of a stay guests can't photograph and can't forget.
Rosa Marchetti
Hotel breakfast spaces became the new lobby — on purpose
The communal table by the coffee machine is the most engineered room in the hotel: mornings pay for the building, and design has noticed.
Peter Almeida
Cliffside resorts: the architecture of the edge
Building a luxury hotel on a cliff is an engineering dare wrapped in a view — and the techniques that keep them up there explain a lot about building on difficult sites anywhere.
Rosa Marchetti
Why hotel check-in moved to the bar
The front desk is dissolving into a seat, a tablet, and a welcome drink — hospitality's most practical design change, and the one with the clearest lessons for hosts.
Rosa Marchetti
Spa design principles that work in an ordinary bathroom
Real spas engineer calm with heat, water, sound, and sequencing — techniques that translate to a standard five-by-eight bathroom better than you'd think.
Peter Almeida
Hotel lighting has lessons for every room in your house
Great hotels never light a room from the ceiling — they layer four jobs of light and dim each one. The technique copies to a house for a few hundred dollars.
Rosa Marchetti
Motel conversions and the boutique revival on the old highway
America's mid-century motels — too dated to compete, too well-located to die — are finding second lives as design hotels and monthly housing.
Peter Almeida
What a branded residence actually buys you
A condo with a hotel's name on it can mean white-glove everything — or a licensing deal wearing a tuxedo. The difference is in the paperwork.
Rosa Marchetti
Hotel bathroom design tricks worth stealing for your own
Hotels spend fortunes engineering ten-square-meter rooms that feel like spas. The best ideas are cheap; the expensive one is knowing where it goes.
Peter Almeida