by Nic Graham

Design Narrative in Hotels: Enhancing Guest Experience

This July, internationally-renowned interior architect Nic Graham took us on a webinar-based journey to discover some of the world’s most incredible hotel designs to see how design enhances guest experience. Here, Nic shares notes about his own hotel-design voyage, including highlights along the way.

We had the privilege, over the last decade, to witness and engage in various changes in hotel design in Australasia. One of which is the fascination of sense of place and storytelling within the parameters of the interior design scope. Owners and operators are realising that each property can be unique to place and purpose while maintaining service and facility standards.

Competing with home stay and Airbnb, the hotel operators look at ways in which they can enhance a guest experience through a heavily laced design sensory experience that can communicate a story, a history, a location.

Design narratives draw from the physical, historical and social aspects of the destination. As a designer, I hope to bring local culture to life and tell conceptual story through subtle details, planning theories or even striking artworks and graphics. It’s more than purely aesthetics – rather a representation of a deeper meaning and allowing a take-home idea for the guest.

I always start with the narrative first and look at how I can tell a story through design; make it unique and unexpected; convey the meaning of an idea through a form, space, light, colour, texture, or scale; and how it may enhance a guest experience and elicit positive emotions.

I put myself into the role of end-user; walk through the space with the eyes of a guest to try to achieve a WOW-factor or an Instagram moment… a trigger to an emotive response – hence a memory association with the hotel to spread the word. I question the natural light, the architectural volume and, in most instances, see how to expose the raw architectural shell, onto which we can project a polished layering of materials.

W Brisbane

The W Brisbane was the first W Hotel in Australia. Its interiors are inspired by Aussie vibes and the design narrative, ‘A River Dreaming’, is based on the Aboriginal story of the serpent river and the life the river brings to the city. The W DNA has been woven in with the free and easy Aussie attitude: colour, colonial heritage, modernity, ethnicity, influence of Australia’s indigenous roots, with a BrisVegas theme that adds some humor to the design. From the moment of arrival, the vision is to showcase a hotel that has an Australian slant on it. The feeling is one of positive energy that flows throughout the hotel from the moment the guest enters. Inspired by the beautiful aspects of Queensland’s heritage to form a contemporary interior, W Brisbane celebrates the best of Australia and provides a contemporary interpretation of Brisbane’s indigenous heritage.

QT Auckland

The theme for a QT Auckland – an oyster shell, rough outside and seductively polished on the inside – was a metaphor for a repurposed inner-city building and hotel conversion; a shell hiding the luxury that lies within. It was onset by my first visit to Auckland and a dozen oysters – the salty sweet is a metaphor for the design, where we have created a cocooning interior that uses interesting local materials and suppliers, adding to the harbour-based neighbourhood narrative of QT Auckland.

Harnessing the idea that beauty lies within, the theme of discovery is a central narrative throughout the guest experience. The oyster narrative is a loose one, but extends to some interior components that we used, such as wall textures, bespoke rugs and carpets, and graphics and artworks that celebrate Auckland’s DNA and the mythical sea surrounding the land of the long white cloud.

To view the webinar in its entirety, visit: https://bit.ly/3sp893Y