HIX 22

Great things will grow.
The hotel is back.

The Hotel Interiors experience is a two-day expo showcasing established and emerging brands within the hotel sector. As well as networking opportunities, installations and activations, there is a thorough talks agenda led by industry experts, which is arguably the real pull to the show as they look forward to exploring future trends within the hospitality market.

Sustainability was a key topic of the show with the consensus that sustainability itself was no longer enough. A widely accepted opinion was that we need to shift into the age of recovery, and into a period of healing and restoration.

Looking at circular and regenerative material innovations, mycelium was a hot topic of the show. So much so that ‘The Mush Room’ designed by WeWantMoreStudio was centre stage as the event’s main bar was grown from mycelium in reference to the conference edition title ‘Great things will grow’.

This ‘Ultra sustainable fungus structure composed of branching and intertwining roots’ highlighted the possibilities of mycelium as a material and opened conversations about the future of design.

As always there were conversations around the definition of hospitality, widely considered as an ‘elevated experience of your own space’. An acceptance that as your own personal space improves and becomes more tailored to your lifestyle, so must the external experience of Hotels and F+B in order to remain elevated in your perception; therefore Millennials expected experience differed somewhat from GenZ needs. Whilst this ‘elevated state’ can be defined in many ways through interiors outputs, service provision and product itself, it appears that the sense of community and programme led experience is how operators are facilitating this growth and staying on top of what customers want and need, as well as bridging the tribes.

Programming, whether it’s a dining experience, wellness experience or a craft activity, brings a sense of community and like mindedness to a space. With wellbeing a significant core value, the ‘wellness’ aspect of programming is accelerating at speed.

Shared values, be it making a positive impact, wanting great experiences and the desire to feel at home (but better) is driving brands to think wider about their offering. With the post covid shift to Working from Home it has become apparent that whilst many do want to WFH it’s not necessarily ‘at home’ and this is where a different space, but local, comes into play.

Another key topic addressed was the Metaverse and the evolution of technology and how we engage with it. Using gaming mechanisms to make a more social, integrated virtual environments applied to the hospitality industry.

As hotel brand, Leven, launches its second hotel in the Metaverse (a plot in Decentraland) they discussed the opportunity to extend their brand as “a playground where rules can be broken” and an opportunity to ‘super-charge’ what they do in the real world by building a hotel not bound by real life rules of architecture in order to create a truly inspiring space.

Creating secondary digital spaces where additional amenity spaces can be provided for customers, hosting talks, curating art galleries and picking up wearables creates an exciting way to blend the brand experience on and offline.

But how do you recreate the essence of a hotel in the metaverse when there’s no bed to sleep on or food to eat? The response came that there were opportunities to work with the same materials, same artists and same journey that was experienced in real hotel and to create NFTs; for Leven specifically, there was a free Leven pair of wearable socks connecting real and virtual world.

Whilst Lo fi at the moment the Ecommerce opportunities for merchandise (as demonstrated by Balenciaga launching its fashion line in the metaverse) is already becoming apparent to early adopters. If brands can blend the application so for example if you buy a wearable in the metaverse the real thing is also delivered to your home, then there becomes an interesting future.

From a brand perspective it’s not immersive yet, and widely regarded more of a long play. However, if the future holds development for a second skin which would allow a haptic experiences to develop then what could this mean for our new blended future?