Elizabeth Lowrey

Great hotels have a great story to tell – a story in which design, architecture and programming fuse into a unique experience that appeals to each guest’s physical senses and deep emotions, leading to great memories. 

Our firm has worked for decades with Disney, Caesar’s, The Peninsula Hotels and other premier hospitality clients, and we’ve learned that the charm, romance and delight of a stay in a top hotel is only partly about luxurious settings. Real magic appears when design elements and hotel staff work together to create a seamless stay. Hoteliers understand this; they invest in hiring, training and keeping employees who deliver service that goes above and beyond expectations. 

These employees, rich in training and experience, might also hold the key to better design solutions for hotel developers. 

Hotel planning and programming begins with a lot of quantitative input – budgets, building codes, required amenities, guest activities and the rest – but it is the qualitative design of space and experience that distinguishes the inspiring from the merely functional. In search of elegant solutions, developers study customer surveys and hire focus groups to provide qualitative insights. While useful, these methods are self-limiting because guests and focus group participants react to existing designs and experiences. They are judgmental but not creative, and thus they rarely incubate memorable new design concepts. 

Elkus Manfredi Architects deploys a new method to generate original design ideas for professional workplaces such as offices and laboratories. It is a discipline we call “co-creation,” and its innovative results suggest it could be useful for hospitality design as well. 

Co-creation enlists the users of a workplace to participate in the design process from beginning to end. Early in the process, employees express their emotional relationship to work activities (from “magical” to “collaborative” to “private”) and join with designers to create spaces encouraging the most valuable emotions. Quantitative data is added by detailed study of workflow, technology usage and foot traffic. 

A Service Culture at Premier Properties 

How could this work for a hotel? Who has “ownership” of a space temporarily? 

The answer to this challenge is suggested in the service culture of premier properties, where customer-facing employees provide close attention, novel experiences and creative problem-solving to guests. no coincidence that the top-rated hotels for guests are also the top-rated hotels for employees. Exceptional staff have an uncommon ability to demonstrate know-how, energy and personal consideration. They delight in delighting customers. 

With their intimate knowledge of the guest experience and their penchant to go above and beyond for customers, frontline staff can be perfect proxies for guests in a co-creation process. Welcoming staff, concierges, guest attendants, valets, food service and other employees observe guests interacting with the physical and temporal environment. They memorize the most efficient traffic pattern through a lobby. They know which spaces encourage people to linger (when they wish to linger) and which spaces move busy people efficiently to their destinations. 

An intuitive designer might ask, “Tell me about a time a guest waited a long time in the lobby to meet a business partner.” Lobby design can encourage serendipitous encounters among guests, staff and strangers (we call them “creative collisions”). 

Empathy is the magic ingredient of the process. Certain frontline staff are able to enter the customer’s psyche and react to design ideas on behalf of the customer. The staff need not have design expertise; co-creation is an iterative process in which the participant inspires the designer and then reacts to design solutions. 

As we’ve observed in designing corporate headquarters, there could well be a side benefit, as hospitality staff who help design a hotel acquire a sense of pride and ownership in the final facility. At a minimum, co-creation widens the circle of employee engagement by demonstrating respect for the unique experiences of customer-facing staff – respect that is repaid by loyalty, engagement and longer job tenure from the most talented employees. 

Simply put – nobody knows more about how guests feel, act and interact in a hospitality space than the hotel’s frontline employees. Enlisting them during the entire design process as creative advocates for guests can generate exciting new interior designs built on real-world experience. 

Elizabeth Lowrey is a principal at Elkus Manfredi Architects.