Hospitality
Design-driven hotels, hotel groups, and hospitality concepts where architecture meets experience.
Hospitality is a newer category in the directory, recognizing that the same design sensibility applied to objects and interiors now extends to where we stay. These are the hotel groups and boutique properties where the architecture, interiors and guest experience are treated as a single design problem.
1 Hospitality brand — mostly from Italy
About hospitality
South Tyrolean, Scandinavian and Japanese properties dominate, and the common trait is restraint — spaces designed around the landscape, the light and the materials at hand rather than around a brand identity. The best entries here feel like someone's considered home rather than a hotel.
This category also includes hospitality groups whose approach to food, interiors and guest experience has led them to create retail products — tableware, textiles, pantry goods — that stand on their own as design objects.
What to look for
- Architecture that responds to its specific landscape and climate, not a transplanted aesthetic.
- Named designers, artists or local craftspeople involved in the interiors.
- A food programme rooted in the region rather than imported.
- Properties old enough to have developed character, or new enough to have been designed from scratch.