Sometimes, these two halves coexist within a single individual. More often, they are embodied by different people within the client organization – one person driving vision, another driving delivery. Both are equally our client. As designers, are constantly bridging between them, translating ideas across these two mental frameworks. This duality is essential and remains a dynamic challenge throughout the design process.

In the early phases of a project, the visionary takes the lead. This is the moment for expansive thinking, ideation, and exploration. As the project matures, the business-oriented mindset becomes more dominant, pushing the design towards clarity, functionality, coordination, costing, and timelines.

Designers are trained to imagine. Designers are great imagineers; we visualize potential futures and communicate ideas and narratives through compelling graphic and spatial languages. At OBMI, designers are exceptional storytellers, using immersive visual media to express ideas. Yet the most effective designers are also those who possess a deep understanding of the business of hospitality. They understand operations, programming, and hotel performance drivers, and they embed these criteria into design from the very beginning, even during early exploration and ideation.

This ability to integrate functional metrics into vision exploration allows bold ideas to become successful hospitality environments. When business fundamentals are considered alongside the creative thinking from the outset, innovative concepts evolve more smoothly into the final project. This approach reduces friction, minimizes late-stage redesign, and aligns expectations across stakeholders.

Beyond metrics and execution, hospitality design must also consider how spaces make people feel. Emotional and sensory experience increasingly define value in hospitality environments. Architecture is no longer only about form and function, but about shaping experience, memory, and wellbeing. This human dimension adds another layer to the intersection between vision and business.

The more fluent our hospitality designers are in the language of hospitality business – revenue sources, operational structures, stakeholders needs, and performance metrics – the more strategic our design solutions become. This fluency allows designers to communicate ideas clearly and credibly to clients, operators, and brands. Only at this intersection can designers truly become Trusted Advisors. Trust is built on the combined power of creativity, insight, reliability, and knowledge, enabling us to guide clients through key decisions across the lifecycle of a project.

At OBMI, we actively train our designers to understand the business of Hospitality. Through Hospitality University, our internal learning platform, our designers develop a structured understanding of hotel design across ten modules. The learning path begins with Storytelling and Ideation, moves through Planning and Programming, and continues with focused modules on Rooms, Social Areas, Food & Beverage, Meetings, Wellness, and Back of House, concluding with the Business and Future of Hospitality.

Our designers learn key hospitality performance metrics such as ADR, Occupancy Rate, RevPAR, and TRevPAR. They study how revenue sources differ between resort hotels, urban hotels, and lifestyle hotels, and how these differences influence design decisions. They are introduced to operating structures and asset management so that design solutions are grounded in real-world conditions.

Food & Beverage illustrates this integration clearly. While rooms remain the primary revenue driver in hotels, the role of F&B has grown significantly, particularly in urban lifestyle hotels where strong local patronage can push F&B revenue beyond 35% of total revenue. This insight directly informs how designers position, size, and prioritize social and dining spaces as cultural and commercial anchors within a project.

Wellness is another evolving dimension. As the wellness economy expands, wellness principles are no longer confined to spas. They are applied across the entire hotel experience. We move spas out of basements and reimagine them as daylight-oriented, sensory environments integrated into to the guest journey. Wellness becomes an experience-driven design lens rather than a single department.

In parallel, branded residential real estate has become integral to many hospitality developments. Understanding the business fundamentals of this hybrid model allows designers to advise our clients more strategically. Hotel and residential assets operate on different timelines and revenue structures, yet they complement one another strategically. Residential sales generate front-loaded capital that helps offset the financial challenges of the hotel’s early operational years Meanwhile, the hotel delivers long-term, recurring revenue. Together, they create a more resilient financial model and broaden a diversified investor base.

Across Food & Beverage, Wellness, and Branded Residential, the same principle applies: these are no longer standalone components but integrated experience systems that shape identity, lifestyle, and long-term value.

Our goal is simple: to ensure that creativity and visioning at OBMI are always supported by knowledge. Hospitality is a fascinating field – rich with opportunity for creativity and innovation, but it also demands precision. Only by mastering both halves of the brain can we deliver design solutions that balance guest experience, functionality, and operational success.

As hospitality grows more complex and more human-centered, designers must become both cultural thinkers and strategic advisors. Vision and business strategy must converge. The most successful projects – and the most enduring partnerships – are born at the intersection of both.