Hospitality's New Wave

It’s clear that when it comes to crafting spaces to eat, drink, sleep, and play, old design formulas no longer cut it. As guests crave more imaginative hospitality spaces, here are five emerging studios reshaping the industry in the United States.

- Mikki Brammer

Reunion Goods & Services

It was somewhere above the Midwest, at an altitude of around 40,000 feet, that Reunion Goods & Services first came into being in late 2011. Its founding trio, Laura Flam, Eric Adolfsen, and Carlton DeWoody, were en route to their debut project—a reclaimed 1960s ski lodge called Wildwood in Snowmass, Colorado—when it struck them that they might as well make their collaboration official.

The name Reunion applied on several levels. Adolfsen had known Flam, an interior designer, since elementary school, and had also worked on several projects with DeWoody, a fellow New Yorker and art director. A year or two after that Colorado trip, the trio realized they were in need of interior architects for several of their projects. Flam, an alum of Roman and Williams, reached out to two former colleagues—Carrie Dessertine and Dana Jaasund—who together had created the studio Own Entity. After freelancing with Reunion for a time, they became official partners over lunch at an Indian restaurant in 2014.

Rummage about the Reunion office—a spacious roost just off the ornate lobby of the old AT&T Long Distance Building in Tribeca, New York—and you’ll get the distinct feeling that things are a little tongue-in-cheek around here, with tchotchkes like clip-on Garfields and action figures scattered throughout. That humor is ever present in the studio’s hospitality projects. The nightclub Squares, for example, turns the traditional idea of the New York social club on its head. The usual tropes are still there—fireplaces, trophy shelves, mounted deer heads—but as playfully pixelated facsimiles created using mosaic tiles.