Hotel (Interior Structures S.) - Hardcover

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ELEANOR CURTIS is a writer and photographer based in London. She works with a number of UK national broadsheets and various international journals. Main features include architecture, urban design and interiors. Her reportage work has included extensive coverage of the conflict in Angola since 1998 with two international photographic exhibitions. She has also worked as a photographer in Angola for Save the Children Fund UK and the United Nations World Food Programme.

Aus dem Klappentext

The steep increases recently witnessed in both business and leisure travel have helped provoke a new variety in hotel interiors, and designers from various disciplines are now establishing a range of design solutions catering to the widely differing demands of each client type, giving new identities to hotels. form the boutique hotel to the airport atrium, the urban retreat to the contemporary resort, the immensity of Vegas to the intimacy of Beirut, Hotel Interior Structures presents a wide range of these new design trends found in present-day hotel interiors.

This volume aims to offer architects, interior designers and hotel owners - as well as those with a more general interest in the use of interior design detail to create a particular atmosphere or living experience - a valuable insight into the what, why and how of current design directions for hotels across the globe. Identifying ten hotel types that have been conceived within the last ten years, it features text, plans and detailed photography of a selection of hotels of each type, as well as interviews with some of the key figures involved. With examples of hotels in major cities and resorts worldwide - from London, Paris and New York to locations in Japan, Egypt and Lebanon - it gives a complete picture of the creativeness and imaginativeness of hotel interior design at the beginning of the 21st century.

Hotel Interior Structures is the first book in the new Wiley Academy "Interior Structures" series, highlighting innovative interior design in specific building types. The next title in the series will be Bar Restaurant Interior Structures.s

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Places Are hotels simply places to rest our heads for a night or two, or are they more than this.

Are they places instead where we desire to be someone other than who we are, a place for fantasy, a place to dream. Or on a more mundane level, another place of work ?

Guests want designs that will complement these needs to one extent or another; and of fundamental importance to this is the reason for our stay at the hotel.

Stereotypically, business trips are quick-paced and demand a hotel that will support fast turn around, efficiency, technology, reliable and quick restaurants and bars, and of course, peace and quiet. City breaks are typically spread over a long weekend and demand a little more from the hotel, acting as a micro-cosm of the city visited, and a place instantiating local culture: the guest wants to experience a slice of the city within the four walls of the hotel. Airport stay-overs are brief but demand that the hotel act as a 24 hour service centre with high priorities on easy access to international communications and information. And there are holidays, where a clean break from the daily routine of life back home wants to be broken, in one way or another. The resort hotel can do this by offering 'another world' (usually of entertainment) for pure escapism, or by offering another level of life where you may 'live' like a king for a week or two.

Blurring edges Aside from the last category of holiday resort hotels, functional distinctions between the others are becoming more and more blurred. This blurring has been afforded by the increasingly global nature of modern life; and on the one side push the guest to demand a mix of services or more so 'experience' from the hotel, and on the other, facilitate the hotel to respond offering a fusion of functions.

For example, the business traveller may have access to booking hotels via the internet and may also have the opportunity to carry on business from his room in one of many hotels rather than just 'business hotels'. The city stomper may also choose to surf the internet in search of the most interesting-looking hotel with a selection of digital images to help his choice, rather than using the travel agent. The one-night city stop-over between flights may also have more choice with the seamless travelling afforded by new 'speedlink' trains between airport and city.

In contrast resort hotels, must compete with the improved and impressive multi-media based exposure of other worlds - computer simulations, high quality still image reproduction, and film - and offer something that will exceed well-informed expectations. Thus, the architecture and interiors must take themes to the edge of fantasy and offer an experience like no other. Vegas and Disney's 'entertainment architecture' are cases in point.

Our 21st guest needs a hotel that encompasses modern design on a creative, interesting, stimulating and intelligent level that will appeal to him in both the global (in touch with the world) and the personal (in touch with him) sense.

The hotel designer in turn, must move with these technology-changing times, and offer a better 'experience' of hotel that can match more specifically these individual needs and tastes, rather than that of a stereotype. And over the last two decades, hotel design has moved.

The Hotels

A back drop The idea of the 'boutique' hotel was born in the early 1980s from an experimental idea by hotel entrepreneur Ian Schrager. Teaming up with interior designer Andrie Putman, Morgans Hotel of New York, was the first hotel that emphasised the experience of hotel design from the inside. This was a turning point in the approach to hotel design and we have since seen this 'boutique' idea transform itself into a 'hip' hotel, a 'designer' hotel, an 'urban resort' through to a place for 'visceral' experiences. These labels are a little vague and also overlap in what they imply: the new 'contemporary' hotels are all of this and more.

They are 'boutique' in the sense that they are on a smaller scale with attention to fine detail. They are also 'hip' in the sense that they play on fashion trends and attract a style-conscious guest. They are 'designer' hotels in the sense that they often have a designer's signature on the interiors. They are an 'urban resort' in that they offer a hide-out within the hub of the city and at the same time capture the essence of the city. And they offer, more recently, 'visceral' experiences through the creative use of colours, textures and sounds. But they are more than just the sum of these parts.

Perhaps the most important and subtle turning point in the development of interior design trends for the contemporary hotel was the introduction of the narrative into design. Inturn, requiring that the designer views the project more as a film director, theatre set director, or author of fiction .

In these new projects the interior design of the hotel pushes the effects of design further, and carries the responsibility of the success of the overall theme at both the large public scale of the lobby or restaurant, down to the detailed personal level in the bedrooms and bathrooms. It is the 'experience' of this overall theme or concept, that is expressed through the interiors, that the guest will identify with and will carry away with him as his memory of the hotel.