How Do Hotels Make Waiting Enjoyable?
After many hours of travel, the last thing you want is to spend more time waiting, but the check-in process at hotels takes time, and they know this – therefore they have invested heavily into making your wait as pleasant an experience as possible. There are glasses of iced lemonade, easy jazz music (sometimes even played live) and soft seats upholstered in leather and rich textiles.
For this article, we are taking a look at the interior design of hotel lobbies and how everything comes together to make the experience of waiting unlike anywhere else in the world. Here are some design tips from hotels that you can use.
Scale Up with Large Format Tiles
To accommodate the large volume of people (not to mention luggage) moving through them, hotels go big for their lobbies: double volume ceilings are typical and even expected of high-end places, but that’s just one part of what creates the feeling of vastness. Very often, the flooring, when it is not carpeted, are cobbled from large slabs of marble, and the reception counter would also tend to be clad with large marble or stone pieces to create that feeling of grandeur.
While you may or may not have a double volume ceiling, you could recreate the effect by going big and bold with your wall and floor designs. Our exclusive Vogue Grande series was designed with this in mind.
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Cool Down with Neutral Hues
Unless it’s Christmas or Lunar New Year, most hotel lobbies will be largely clad in neutral hues, mostly represented by plaster, wood and marble, and the lighting is provided by a combination of natural light and warm yellow hues from recessed lamps and indirect lighting. There is a delicate balancing act at work at all times: while the marble serves to bring down the overall colour temperature, it is kept from becoming too cool by the wood textures and warm lighting, which creates that comfortable feeling of being at ease.
Some of our favourite marble designs come from Lux 4.0 and Conti-flow – check them out!
Segmentation with Different Floor Tiles
Particularly in larger hotel lobbies, you might observe how the furniture and even the pattern of the floor tiles are arranged to section the entire space into subtly different segments, allowing for a natural flow of movement of people through the space without disrupting the ones who are sitting down and waiting.
You most likely already have “zones” in your space dedicated to different function – why not take it a step further and design around it? The high-contrast shades of our Legacy series can help differentiate between areas; or if you prefer a more natural feel, Eco-foresta has you covered on that front.
Prefer to leave it to the experts? Let’s be in touch.
10 other hotel lobby ideas here. Check them out!
