In a desperate bid for 'likes', once innovative and inspiring hotel design is becoming identical the world over, writes Anna Hart.
Reclaimed wood, industrial lighting, neon slogan signs, rose gold accents, whitewashed walls with pops of colour, mid-century Danish furniture, subway tiling, parquet floors and exposed brickwork. All perfectly nice things, as individual entities, but together they coagulate to form a generic millennial-baiting aesthetic found across the globe in coffee shops, hotel lobbies and co-working spaces in London, Melbourne and Buenos Aires.
Interior design ha
Lobby of the Langham, Chicago. Photo / @langhamchicago, Instagram
s always been subject to trends and hotel design has been at the forefront of any new trend, a reliable indicator of the spirit of the age. But there's a difference between a trend and a tsunami — and between a fad and a diktat. And these design flourishes have become so eerily ubiquitous across the urban landscape that they no longer warrant the word design. Interior design is the creation of an aesthetic plan, not the imposition of visual cliches.
What we're seeing in hotels across the globe is the death of design. Every Danish sideboard or vaguely deco light fitting is a signal that today we prize Instagrammability more highly than innovation or inspiration; that creatively we're pursuing "likes" more desperately than love.
As a travel writer, I confess I have contributed to this problem by writing stories with headlines such as Twenty Most Instagrammable Cafes in LA and Most Instagrammable Murals in Miami. For a time, rendering a photo-sharing app into a congratulatory adjective seemed harmless, and these pieces snack-like compendiums of the most garish, quirky or self-consciously hipster hotels, restaurants or museums writers had come across. But then we realised that hotels (and restaurants and cultural institutions) were starting to undergo social media-friendly makeovers, much of it like ill-advised cosmetic surgery.
Lobbies were lobbying for inclusion in our lists, and were prepared to rip out any period detail and cart in any quirkily reupholstered sofa to make the grade. But most depressingly of all, hotel design was becoming less about pleasing guests, and more about pleasing a guest's Instagram followers.
We can't entirely fault the hotels and restaurants for this. The travel and hospitality industry is spluttering for life as social media's influence soars, and Instagrammability seems like an easy win, a tried-and-tested formula for luring customers through the revolving door and — bonus — getting them to do a few minutes of free advertising for your business.
Red Dot Hotel, Taichung, Taiwan. Photo / @m1485, Instagram
And so out went low lighting and candles; in came dazzling white linens and crockery and worn wooden tables. Out went subtle, long-standing details like family photographs in the hall or odd little ornaments; in came gigantic props like indoor swings, oversized stuffed giraffes and shouty slogan art that works as a caption in itself, saving us valuable seconds. When you're desperately seeking Instagrammability, design becomes either about an unobtrusive backdrop, or comedy props.
This is particularly disheartening in the context of hotels and travel, because the main purpose of travel is to expose ourselves to the new. We travel to see things we haven't seen before ... and instead we find the same mismatched crockery and faux-vintage leather sofas in Cape Town as we do in Christchurch.
Historically, one of the primary delights of staying in a hotel was to steal interior design cues from it. We'd stay in hotels in order to feel infinitely more rich, more stylish, and more sophisticated than we actually were. And we expected to be dazzled by design, to proudly pilfer period detailing, to appropriate art, to seek out stylishness, and bring some of what inspired us in Miami, or Milan, or Marseille, home
Hotel in Antalya, Turkey. Photo / @eseruyanik, Instagram
I can still rhyme off the hotels that have inspired how I decorate my own humble little flat: Palazzo Avino in Ravello, Brody House in Budapest, Riad El Fenn in Marrakech. But how can we expect hotels to remain wilfully unique, when we're all taking exactly the same photos of ourselves against brickwork walls?
We used to travel to hotels in search of inspiration. Today, hotels seem to be taking inspiration from us — or our Instagram feeds, the very worst part of us.
