For the Moment | Is the Design Hotel Over?

This week’s guest blogger is Laurent Vernhes, co-founder of the travel Web site Tablet Hotels. Vernhes, who was born in France and lived in half a dozen countries before settling down in Brooklyn, founded Tablet in 2000 as way of helping stylish, culturally attuned travelers find hotels to match. The site’s tight edit of properties spans high and low, includes opinionated commentary and ratings, and is showcased annually in a hardcover guide. Read Vernhes’s previous posts here.

We may not know how to pronounce the name of this decade (zeros? the zero zeros?) but we know what its interior design style looks like. It borrows a bit from the ’70s and the ’60s, and from some contemporary originals from the ’90s, like Philippe Starck — and suddenly it’s everywhere, with one hotel after another renovating in a contemporary ’00s style.

Eight years ago, when TabletHotels.com was starting, we were always happy to see a new contemporary-style hotel — boutique or not — because they were pioneers. Last year alone, we noted more than 200 worldwide, many of them in the same vaguely ’70s-inspired brown-and-gray palette (which itself replaced the white cubes of the ’90s).

From Phuket to Monterey, Copenhagen to Dubai, there are now boutique hotels that look pretty much the same. This visual sameness was one of the things that put us off chain hotels in the first place. But not many of these new hotels are related to one another. They simply seem to have all adopted the ’00s “international style” — “international” meaning not sophisticated or cosmopolitan but nationless, global.

The originals — Starck, Christian Liaigre, Antonio Citterio, Jacques Garcia — have become stars in their own right, and if they seem to be opening a lot of hotels right now, it’s only because they’re collecting well-deserved rewards for their earlier innovations. It’s a great time for the people we like to call “global nomads” — more and more new hotel developments are emphasizing design, which is good for travelers who are bored with the status quo. But when locations become overcrowded with hotels of this style, it creates the same problem that these hotels were originally designed to solve: a shortage of personality, change, uniqueness.

The prevalence of this international style has made our job in selecting the best new hotels far more difficult. Even the biggest chains are getting in on the act. The Clarion, in Stockholm, is the biggest hotel in town, and it’s anything but boutique, but its contemporary interiors rival some of the independents. Even Motel 6, my favorite American budget motel, has a redesign in the works.

When we started TabletHotels.com, we deliberately avoided embracing a particular size or style of hotels — under a hundred rooms, or contemporary minimalist — because criteria like these are no better a guarantee of a unique hotel experience than any star rating system is.

Hotel Therme in Vals, Switzerland.

There are some phenomenal design boutique hotels, to be sure. One of my personal favorites (from the ’90s) is the Hotel Therme in Vals, Switzerland. The architect, Peter Zumthor (whose wife manages the property), is an internationally recognized master. This particular creation has influenced countless architects and hoteliers. Yet, more than 10 years after its opening, it remains fresh and powerful, and all the imitators haven’t dulled its impact.

But still the words “boutique” and “design” were quickly abused. “Boutique” became tainted by hotels that focused on the environment at the expense of the service, and some guests tolerated poor service as long as the design was outstanding. And “design” became shorthand for modern design, which is obviously restrictive and offers no indication of the quality of the design. It came to mean form above function, and became synonymous with impractical hotels — I remember a hotel in Milan where it took me 10 minutes to figure out how to turn off the lights before going to sleep.

One of the Firmdale properties in London, the Haymarket Hotel.

At the moment plenty of interesting work is being done outside of the international style. The hunger for change, which gave birth to the design boutique in the first place, is still there. Some companies, like Firmdale Hotels in London, have even managed to successfully establish a warmer, more organic and daring style, within which each new property has its own distinct personality.

It seems the world is ready to move on from the ’00s international style. There are hoteliers out there digging into the depths of their passion to create original properties, places with integrity and heart that people can connect to. Maybe in a few years this new vibrancy and eclecticism will harden into a style for the 2010s, but to me, right now, it looks like an organic development, an explosion of diversity.