Talking hotels

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Colin Seah.

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Ministry of Design design director Colin Seah gives an overview of the market, warns against repeating the same old design formula and considers what the future holds for hotel room design in the region.

What direction or trends do you see in contemporary hotel design?

I think there are probably as many directions in hotels as there are people who appreciate them.

Right now, the one thing that is common is that operators are recognising there is a huge need to differentiate themselves. They are turning to a variety of sources now, and while price point has always been one, now there is also design.

Just 20 years ago, the hotel industry was so dull. It was just Holiday Inns and Sheratons, but now, because of the new level of travel and the opening up of exotic locations with people wanting to appreciate the finer nuances of where they are, one of the trends I am interested in is how you can be simultaneously globally relevant but also locally charged. That is a tricky thing to do.

How do you think hotels in the Middle East hold up internationally?

On the whole there seems to be a predisposition towards ostentation - luxury is quantified in a very obvious way. There is a kind of an ‘over-the-top' [mentality] that I think could be channelled in a slightly more sophisticated manner.

I feel that also, the people who are now travelling to the Middle East are very sophisticated, and would demand that too. It is no longer about just catering to a local clientele, it is a very international destination.

I think there could be a wider range [of design in the region]. Maybe the designers thinking about hotel rooms in terms of visitors who are very similar, but there are all types of travellers now. Rooms are being used on a lot of different levels.

We [at the Ministry of Design] cut our teeth on what has become the most famous boutique hotel in Singapore, the New Majestic. It was a massive experiment. There were only 30 keys in a very old historic building, and we basically designed seven different room typologies, each completely different from one another.

We drew from cues that were local. Because housing is so expensive in Singapore, singles don't live alone. Most single people live with their parents until they get married, so there is not a lot of privacy.

When people want to have a birthday party they will often rent rooms in a hotel and invite a bunch of friends over, and the most you could have would be two rooms interconnected. But we designed our hotel so that you could include up to four rooms in a row.

A lot of design here is just the same basic hotel formula just with a different finish, and that's not very interesting. We want to change the way hotel rooms are, at a fundamental level - not just for fun, but in a very relevant way, of course!

What is the thinking behind the ‘hotel room of the future' you designed for Depa?

The idea was very simple. In a typical scenario where luxury is more space, we were thinking that luxury was actually more spaces, where you could create different experiences within those spaces. So then the challenge was to create a room which was one [space], but also three spaces.

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