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YEARBOOK 2008 |
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LOOKING
FORWARD
In 2008, Design Hotels™ celebrates its 15th year of existence: but to celebrate we’ve chosen to focus on the future instead of looking back at what we’ve accomplished. As hotel design becomes simultaneously more specific and more diverse, we are looking ahead to what’s coming over the next 15 years in an almost philosophical sense. This is why we’ve asked designers and hoteliers from a selection of our member hotels – each representing a different approach and from a different part of the world – to describe their thoughts and visions on future hotel design in words, images or both.
Back to the present: This year Design Hotels™ has added 38 new properties – all exemplary in some way – to our portfolio, bringing our total membership to 162 hotels in 40 countries. We are honing in on the best ideas floating in the ether, concepts that represent the kernels of new movements that will unfold into innovative environments, amenities and services that do not yet exist but are just around the corner. Heightened emotions, consciously sustainable buildings and operations, new possibilities opened up by high technology as well as individualised service and a focus on the local: all of these emphases are just the beginning of a new era in travel, the hospitality industry and the very core of hotel design.
The most successful hotels of the future will be a number of things – they will be luxurious, but perhaps not in the way we know luxury today. They will be visually inspiring, evoke emotions and perhaps even automatically interact with us. They will make our entrances and exits easy and seamless. Some of them will be just as comfortable as home, but better, because someone else is doing the work. They may very well tell a story we never knew, or offer us the opportunity to learn something. The exact attributes of most successful future hotels will vary widely, but the best will certainly combine all or a few of the above suggestions into a holistic experience for an increasingly discerning guest. What the hotel of the future will look like also depends upon how responsibly and aesthetically we develop as a global society. The thoughts and ideas you’ll see in this book’s introductory section are those of the architects and designers whose work we respect and whose visions make our company the multifaceted enterprise that it is. Their philosophies are not necessarily, or not always, ours, but it is their range that helps us to become an authority in what we do – which is essentially to curate, care for and present a collection of properties (whose stunning images and descriptions follow) that you can trust embodies the visions that match yours. And those of the coming era.
Claus Sendlinger
CEO & President, Design Hotels AG |
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