A Client’s Guide to a Successful Hotel Refurbishment: Part 2 – Hotel Bedroom Design
The hotel bedroom needs to be well engineered – especially for today’s discerning hotel guest. Due to the sheer volume of bedrooms, this element of a refurbishment will undoubtedly consume the lion’s share of your budget.
As such, all bedroom and en-suite bathroom cost requires the client to cost justify the decision.
Clearly, the bedroom needs to be warm and inviting for the guest and it should be an appropriate reflection of the rack rate for a night’s stay. If it doesn’t reflect good value for money, it’ll be a challenge to attract repeat custom from regular guests.
The Four Key Areas of Hotel Room Design
The hotel bedroom can be broken up into four key zones – the lobby zone, bathroom zone, work zone and the sleep zone.
- The Lobby Zone – This is the area immediately inside the bedroom door. As soon as a guest enters the room, the natural impulse is to consider where they can hang their coat and leave their suitcase. As such, most hotel room designers generally position wardrobes and luggage racks in this zone.
- The Bathroom Zone – This is self explanatory and generally covers everything found within the en-suite bathroom footprint. With this particular zone, hotel room designers should consider the pros and cons of baths versus showers, good lighting for guests shaving and applying make-up, and ease of cleaning for Housekeeping staff to maintain high levels of hygiene.
- The Work Zone – This is the area where the desk is situated and where the guest undertakes all manner of activities – from eating room-service meals, to putting on make-up, to undertaking work on a laptop. It should be a very functional space with good lighting, and plenty of power points for TVs, computers, MP3 players, mobile phone chargers, hairdryers etc. One should also consider the TCMF (tea/coffee making facilities) in this zone.
- The Sleep Zone – This is the area immediately around the bed. A good quality comfortable bed is the starting point for this zone closely followed by good reading light, user-friendly light switching from the bed, and a comfortable headboard.