Retro 1999: "It’s got to be comfortable"
Looking back, it’s amazing how the elements of the Art Design Publicity game were fully in place ten years ago before the Internet multiplied everything. But will the publicity song always remain the same?
Art Design Publicity magazine 2(2): Micro | Re-published 29 July 2010.
This article first appeared in FRAME, 10, pages 56-9 in 1999.
Retro 1999: Hotels with a high design content are in. But how does a setting saturated in style provide a hotel with "added value", and can the whole concept be overdone? "Sometimes design forces people, and it doesn’t work."
Beautiful, lip-smacking, gorgeous. A batch of new hotels sweeping the planet are giving travellers added options, not to mention dynamite interiors to dazzle the senses. Dubbed "cheap and chic" with a touch of Paramount glamour, Seattle’s Ace Hotel—boasting Hempel and Delano-esque white walls and floors—opened its doors last April. In September Rubell Hotels opens its third location in South Florida: the Beach House Bal Harbour’s 170 rooms are being refurbished by the Ralph Lauren residential design team. Designed "to emulate Gilligan’s Island", the hotel’s private beach will feature hammocks and coconut trees. Two Philippe Starck-Ian Schrager hotels are scheduled to open in London in September and December. The high-profile W New York hotel, "where cutting-edge style meets true substance", is one of 14 W hotels to début soon in major cities across the United States. As part of the larger Starwood Hotels & Resorts, which includes Westin and ITT Sheraton, the W New York offers all guests an added bonus—benefits from Starwood premier membership.
Meanwhile, in Amsterdam al eyes are on the refurbished Hilton Hotel, while in Berlin it’s the Grand Hyatt— the list is virtually endless. Another giant, which started as recently as 1993, is Design Hotels International and Planet Hotels and Resorts, an organisation that provides global representation for over 50 hotels worldwide. Its catalogues present lodgings from Sydney to Cyprus and Los Angeles to London, including signature properties such as the City’s Metropolitan, Halkin and One Aldwych, which opened in 1998, as well as Myhotel Bloomsbury, an establishment by Conran Design Partnership that’s been in business less than a year. Buzzwords and jargon abound–cutting-edge, stealth wealth, lifestyle and the local scene meet and mix with familiar old-timers like home and love–some with a ring that routes us back to Starck and Schrager in the 80s and mid-90s. Yet while hotel design has become more and more high-profile, how does a setting saturated in style provide a hotel with "added value", and can the whole concept be overdone?
Whether their emphasis lies on design, lifestyle, service or publicity, designer hotels definitely surpass their "traditional" cousins in accessing a greater variety of media outlets. Smart-set sleepovers are a hot item in the art and design press, the lifestyle press and the travel press, which covers features in newspapers and magazines, as well as special announcements and surveys. Is it easier for designer hotels to do a media launch, even as the newness of the labelling wears thin? Some of those involved in publicising designer hotels prefer to stay in the background, where their role is largely invisible. One publicist we contacted refused to speak on the record. Yet according to Peter Schweitzer, President of Design Hotels and Planet Hotels—headquartered in Sausalito, California—"’It’s still much easier to do a media launch or a so-called designer hotel than for a non-designer hotel."
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