How are hotel rooms designed? Here's how Hilton gets guest spaces check-in ready.
Story Summary
- Hilton's hotel room designs vary depending on the type of property.
- The company often creates models of the spaces on site to test them out well before guests arrive.
- Nearly all the furniture Hilton uses in its hotel rooms is custom-built.
As I walked down the halls of the upcoming Printing House Downtown Nashville, Tennessee, hotel, I stepped around cardboard boxes and cables. But as I entered a guest room on the 11th floor in late April as part of a hard hat tour, the dusty concrete floors gave way to clean, wide planks of hardwood.
The space featured a bed with a backlit headboard, a desk and matching chair in a walnut finish, and brass midcentury accents. While the rest of the Tapestry Collection by Hilton property – expected to open in August – was still a construction site, this room looked nearly finished.
That’s part of Hilton’s hotel room design process. The company often creates models of the spaces on site to test them out well before guests arrive. “You don't want to fix a mistake or something that you may have overlooked 300 times,” Larry Traxler, senior vice president of global Design at Hilton, told USA TODAY. “It's better to do it once in that model room stage, which is why they're so important.”
But that’s just one of many steps that go into getting a hotel room ready for check-in.
How are Hilton hotel rooms designed?
That depends on the type of property. Hilton’s megacategory brands – such as the budget-friendly Spark or the extended-stay LivSmart Studios – are designed using brand prototypes.
“We'll build model rooms, we'll prototype (furniture, fixtures and equipment),” said Traxler. “We’ll build 15 versions of a chair, a lounge chair, or the bed headboard, and work through all the details and select the best one.”
For many other hotels – ranging from DoubleTree to luxury brands like Waldorf Astoria Hotels & Resorts – Traxler said “everything is bespoke.”
