Exhibiting lush greenery, plush sofas and bright wood panelling, hotels are increasingly setting new standards for design, writes Steven Charlton, managing director of Perkins+Will’s London office. Their position is unique: providing both short-term residential units and communal workspaces means that trends in hotel design often trickle down to other sectors.
Companies such as the Big Four need this casual aesthetic – which increasingly blurs hospitality into conventional building design – to attract younger staff and support a more dynamic way of working. The same is true for residential.
At Monday’s BPF conference, it was clear that investors are keenly looking at how hospitality can become more of a focal point for trends in build-to-rent (BTR) and student housing. Hotel design can provide key lessons for both developers and operators around attracting customers, retaining them and driving profitability.
Experiential design and wellbeing
Experiential design – appealing to the Instagram generation – is an increasingly common trend in hospitality. Hotel brands are beginning to recognise that guests want something more from their stay, and are designing buildings to create unique, memorable spaces. This can come in the form of ideas such as eye-catching rooms that are perfect for photo opportunities, and through the use of sensory design.
Smart technology can manipulate sensory variables such as light, scent and sound, and together with greater consideration for tactile design can influence people’s moods and perceptions of spaces. This could present opportunities to create some tangible benefits. For example, being able to help people sleep better and reducing stress would be a boon for student housing around exam time.
Furthermore, when supported by biophilic design, experiential design can benefit people’s happiness and health, both at home and at work. Natural materials and greenery help to lower stress levels and blood pressure, while also helping to enhance air quality – something that is fast becoming critical in cities across the UK.
AI and smart technologies
AI and smart technologies could also help make occupants’ experiences more pleasant. Automatic check-ins, smartphone concierges and facial recognition are beginning to be used more widely in hotels, but could easily be adopted in residential. Being able to speed up the logistics of move-ins or sweep away the mountains of Amazon parcels each day can be as helpful to the bottom line as on-site staff allocation and dynamic price management of rents.
Furthermore, big data – harvesting information around bookings, food deliveries, use of communal space or customers’ climate preferences – can all help improve operators’ understanding of what their residents want. Being able to drive up retention may easily repay any upfront investment.
Community
The lines between public and private realms are also blurring. Hotels are providing greater opportunities for guests to mingle with locals, simply by inviting them in. Being able to demonstrate a similar ‘community premium’ in residential could also help ease planning processes in many areas.
So what?
As more institutional investors shift their gaze to alternatives, design – like investment trends – will blur across BTR and student accommodation. Bringing people out of their rooms and into communal areas by offering the right spaces to study, work or party incentivises residents to integrate. The more friends they have, the more likely they are to stay. And the more flexible spaces are, the greater commercial viability buildings can have. More emphasis on wellbeing and providing a “hotel-like” service could also strengthen operator brands, particularly where you can use data to measure success.
Harnessing data will introduce a wealth of opportunities to streamline and improve services for residents – helping operators evolve their brands and their capacity for growth. This ultimately translates into better engagement with customers, which in turn can help drive brand loyalty and reduce void rates in buildings. Good design can lead to great performance, and as BTR continues to spread, resilience will become increasingly important for investors.
The cross-pollination of hospitality and residential will only amplify and there’s certainly no shortage of ideas to be shared. We live in a world of changes, but it’s up to us in the built environment to recognise best practices and implement them where they best fit.
