Ever wanted to take the Hotel decor home with you?

Hotels are, literally, our homes away from home.  We spend time in them when we’re on vacation and having a good time, but also when we’re on business trips and trying like crazy to get a PowerPoint presentation together before a big meeting.  So, hotels have to do a lot for us—just like our homes do.

There’s lot of research on hotel design—and no wonder, big corporations make lots of money renting us rooms-by-the-night.  Combing through that research and seeing what’s applicable as we design our homes reveals that our houses should:

• Not be designed only for aesthetics but also for doing. Places that are all “flash” are places we want to leave quickly, they don’t seem authentic—places where we live our best lives not only have beautiful beds, but those beds are comfortable to sleep in, for hour after hour.  If we want to relax, our hotels and homes should be designed as the science discussed in this article indicates for example, if we need to solve a tough mental problem, it needs to be designed as this article lays out.
• Send messages about us that make us happy. They need to communicate what we’re proud of in our lives, maybe in photographs or paintings, but more probably in more subtle ways. Sure, a photo of us picking up trash by the seaside shows that we care about keeping the Earth healthy, but use of clearly sustainable materials like bamboo does even more powerfully because it shows we’re “walking the talk.”
• Be designed so that areas that have a utilitarian purpose (say, the laundry room), have a more typical design, while spaces that are likely to be sites of emotional experiences (for example, a living room perhaps), can be a little less typical—all as required by our personality—designing to align with personality is discussed in this article.
• Reflect our culture; culture matters in hotels and it matters in our homes. How to make sure that our home “works” in our national culture, is discussed in this article.  For example, people from more individualistic cultures have greater expectations of being able to have privacy when they want it than people who grew up in more collectivistic ones.  Hotels often must figure out how to support people from multiple national cultures simultaneously, but that is much less likely to be the case in a single home.  Specifically regarding hotels, people from the US are particularly likely to want to feel valued or important in their hotels (and value amenities that help make that happen), while Northern Europeans are particularly attuned to design and service that seems “practical,” while Canadians are particularly attuned to hotel cleanliness, according to Torres, Fu, and Lehto (2014).
• Be biophilic. We’re more apt to choose to stay at a hotel if it has a biophilic design, and feel comfortable there after our “residency” begins if its biophilic.  Another aspect of biophilic design that pays off for hotels financially and in homes is to design hotels and homes in the style of local architecture—a hotel/home in Java shouldn’t look like one in Manhattan.  Indoor plants increase sociability in public spaces like hotel lobbies and cognitive performance wherever we are, so green leafy plants (real or good “fakes”) are good additions to hotel rooms, hotel lobbies, and homes.  Biophilic design is discussed in detail in these articles.

• Feel secure. We sleep in hotel rooms and at home, and when asleep can be easily surprised.  Some researchers link our placement of our bedrooms on the second floor of our homes (when we have a higher floor) with how much safer we felt in our early days as a species sleeping up in the branches of a tree and not on the ground, where anything passing by could take a nibble out of whatever part of us seemed tastiest.  Research has definitively shown that we like to sleep with a view of the door into the room where we’re sleeping but with our bed positioned so that an opening door would initially block anyone who’s entering the room’s view of our bed.
• Coordinate sensory experiences. Relaxing scents need to be combined with relaxing music, for example, not ones that get our hearts racing.  Inconsistent experiences don’t leave us numb, they leave us tense.  Sensory experiences that are relaxing, etc., are discussed in this article and this one.  The impression created through scents smelled, songs heard, etc., also must be consistent with brand images in hotels (and who we think we are as a person at home, as relevant) for maximum positive response.
• Give us a comfortable level of control over our experiences, providing us some options, but not too many. The pleasure centre in our brains lights up when we even anticipate that at some future time we might have some control of our world, so carefully curated sets of options make us happy in hotels and at home.  For example, having say four lighting presets pairing a colour of light and an intensity for that light for our hotel room or dining room at home increases our satisfaction with the lighting option selected that dials that allow us to tune precise light colour and intensity options from hundreds of colour and intensity options.

• Provide privacy when we want it, to spend time with whomever we want or no one at all. We all need time out of the visual and audio range of others from time to time, and when we determine when those “alone” (or with a few carefully selected others) times happen, our wellbeing is considerably improved.  When we alone, or with a few others with whom we form a tight knit group, determine who has visual and audio contact with us, our wellbeing jumps higher.  We often use this time to make sense of recent events in our lives and when we can’t our stress levels build.
• Support socializing with others (details of how design can do this are reviewed in this article). Humans are a social species and just as we need our time apart, we need time together.  In a hotel that may mean being able to eat at a communal table or close to other diners, even when we’re eating alone, and in a home support for socializing can involve not only spaces like sitting rooms where we can spend time with family members but also specific design elements within those spaces, such as seats for all that are all about the same height above the floor and focal points such as pieces of art or window views to which we can divert our eyes when an “eye contact break” is required—read the linked to article for more science-informed tips on designing for positive, together experiences.
• Seems familiar, at least some parts. When we’re in a space that seems fundamentally familiar we can roughly predict what will happen.  Particularly when we feel stressed, being in a space that seems familiar, or typical of whatever sort of place it is, can help us move toward lower stress levels and higher levels of wellbeing.  Being familiar or typical doesn’t mean exactly the same as something previously encountered but enough like what’s happened before so we have some idea what we need to do.  Even if we’ve never used exactly the set of shower controls we find in our hotel bathroom, we need to be able to figure out how to operate them based on our prior life experiences.
• Restore us. After we’ve put in all that work figuring out the shower controls or getting our PowerPoint for tomorrow together, our brains are tired and we need to mentally refresh (designing in opportunities for mental revitalization is discussed in this article).  Refreshment can come via window views of nature, photographs/paintings that present the great outdoors in two dimensions, a few potted plants in visual range, hearing nature sounds (burbling brooks, waves, rustling grasses and leaves, gently calling birds), for example (more options at the lined-to article). . . . And sometimes we just need to go to sleep.  The science of designing to support sleep is covered here.  The most important issues: light and sound:  Try to sleep in as quiet (less than 35 or 40 decibels, which is as loud as loud as a traditional library) and as dark a space as possible—and try to stay cool (we sleep best in temperatures around 65 degrees Fahrenheit; go up ten degrees if you have sleep apnea).

If you’re working on the design or management of a homeless shelter, a hotel/home hybrid, read these articles supplied by Jill Pable at her team at Florida State University:   http://designresourcesforhomelessness.org

Edwin Torres, Xiaxiao Fu, and Xinran Lehto.  2014. “Examining Key Drivers of Customer Delight in a Hotel Experience:  A Cross-Cultural Perspective.” International Journal of Hospitality Management, vol. 36, pp. 255-262.