What do luxury and luxury experience mean today?

Everyone agrees that luxury has moved from “things” to “experiences.” This does not mean that material items are not relevant, but that they are relevant to the extent that they help build the experience. To express my idea of luxury, I want to tell a short story. A few years ago, I took a trip across the Andes mountains on horseback, under quite basic conditions: we slept in the open air, no showers or bathrooms, and a strenuous riding schedule. I call it the least luxurious travel in terms of facilities and amenities. And yet, that awesome landscape, the immensity of the mountains, the vastness, the utter beauty of silence, and us, a tiny tight group of eight, riding where no one had ever been before. The opportunity to live that unique experience is for me the essence of luxury.

When it comes to designing an experience, we want to create this kind of connection -to nature, to history, to a culture, to a people, or to self. To elicit that level of sensations and emotions through our hotel design, it is necessary to create a bond through space, shape, scale, color, temperature, materials, and light, to allow the guest to have an emotional connection that goes beyond the ordinary.

I think that luxury should be meaningful, and to this end there must be some hardship. When it comes to learning something new, there is always a form of questioning, which eventually takes on a meaning. In a hospitality experience there is this stratification between what the destination instills in you, bringing a significant change or addition to your baggage of knowledge, and the idea of comfort, service, and safety. The sum of the two results in ultimate luxury. Knowing that, after a long strenuous trek, you will return to elevated comforts, is luxury.

To create a design story that is synonimous with the place. How can this happen through architecture? What do you look for to make it a good story?

When building stories, our first step is to understand the place, namely the land and geography: What is the landscape? What are the colours of its environment? We study the local architecture, heritage, urban patterns, and construction techniques. Then, we look at the people, their activities, traditions, festivities, art, cooking practices, calligraphy, stories, or unique characters. These elements, which the designer takes care of intertwining to create the story, are added to the guest profile and the brand identity. As when writing a story, there are peaks and valleys, there is a side story, some unique  unexpected characters and some linear chapters. Similarly, when we create the physical space of a hotel we want the “wow moments”, spaces of tranquility,  exciting places of encounter, glimpses of side stories through framed vistas or detour paths, and places of intimacy, such as the spa. All these ups and downs, narrow and wide, moody dark or lighted, being high on top and or underneath, feeling intimate or with the crowd, are the elements that compose a story.

A design project is the result of layers of elements and inspirations. Which layers compose your projects?

The key layers are the guest profile, the brand’s standards and values, the project story we create, and the concept of sequencing. We want to ensure that the guest’s movement through the project is orchestrated trough careful spatial sequencing, to provoke  the sequence of emotions: the initial wow experience, the narrowing of the space, the discovery, and the glimpses.

At OBMI we also refer to the five “S” for hospitality design: Storytelling, Sense of place, Sequencing, Sustainability, and Sensible operation.  The hotel gifts experiences, but it must indeed also operate efficiently and be developed as a winning business. 

Today, resort and hotel facilities are more and more open to local citizens and communities. What is the significance of this evolution?

It is an evolution consistent with OBMI’s core principles that every hotel belongs to its place and that hotels are spaces for social encounter, both for the guests and the community. Hotel restaurants have either moved to the front of the hotel, where they are highly visible at street level, or have become a local destination in themselves. Hotel spas and clubs cater to locals. This creates an integration between hotel guests and local citizens that works also at the business level, as all the amenities – from the gyms to the spas, from the clubs to the meeting rooms – can be sustained from a financial point of view from the combined demand of guests and locals. The local community can also express itself in the hotel spaces through musical events, art exhibitions, local crafts applied to interior design, or through the character and food of the F&B. This the case for example in the OBMI-designed Hyatt Centric hotel in Austin, where the gastronomic offer is particularly expressive of the local culture. Everything that happens in the local community thus comes to inform the hotel with its culture and materials, giving rise to a cross pollination from both sides.