A panel of hotel designers gathered at the Design Centre Chelsea Harbour during this year's WOW!house, and the consensus was refreshing: the flashiest hotel tech is officially out, and being genuinely looked after is back in.
The roundtable, hosted by Hotel Designs with Phillip Jeffries CEO Phillip Bershad, brought together designers from studios including Elicyon, Grove & Co, Customs Bureau and Bergman Design House. Their big theme: hotels obsess over how spaces look, but guests remember how a stay made them feel.
The panel kept circling back to what Marie Soliman Berglund called the "instant hello" — the moment you arrive. She named Claridge's and One&Only as brands that manage a warm, personal welcome without tipping into an intimidating, cold formality. Too often, she argued, designers polish suites and spas while forgetting the front door. Shida Salehi added that a sense of safety and reassurance underpins everything — a traveller landing in a new city, jet-lagged, wants to feel held, not processed.
On what luxury actually means day to day, the answers were refreshingly small: good lighting at breakfast, a quiet nook to take a phone call, a cook who tells you where the coriander was grown that morning, a printed newspaper instead of a QR code. As Shida put it, options are the real luxury — the freedom to decide how you live in a space. But every panellist warned that beautiful design collapses the moment service slips. Indira Arnautovic called service "the biggest conversation in the industry right now," and noted that many hotels do it well without doing it exceptionally, largely because staff turnover is too high.
Two more threads are worth knowing about. First, technology is in retreat: the control panels and in-room tablets that signalled luxury a few years ago now read as a chore. Guests want to walk in, flick one switch and sleep. Marie described a general tech fatigue, and a preference for a human concierge over a service robot. Second, the panel flagged Ennismore and The Hoxton as the brands to beat — guidelines built around people rather than rigid brand standards — in contrast to legacy operators where, as Indira quipped, "the best surprise is no surprise."
For travellers, the takeaway is simple: when choosing where to spend serious money, look past the render. Ask whether a hotel feels personal from the door, whether staff stay long enough to remember you, and whether the tech gets out of your way. The panel's blunt view of interchangeable design — "you open Booking.com and all the hotels look as boring as each other" — is a good filter for your own booking decisions. If the property feels lifeless online, it probably will in person.
The day closed with a tour of WOW!house, including the Phillip Jeffries Morning Room by Sara Cosgrove — a celadon, cream and lilac retreat built around reading, conversation and stillness. A fitting end for a conversation about hotels designed to calm you down rather than impress you.