Hotel Lobbies Reimagined

From budget to luxury, hotel brands are transforming lobbies into social hubs for guests and locals alike

- Tom Otley

We’ve all hung around in hotel lobbies and the chances are it has been pretty boring. We might have been waiting for a taxi or using it as a meeting point with fellow travelers before going off somewhere else. But it’s unlikely that we would have spent a portion of our working day in one, or looked forward to an evening’s entertainment there.

And yet that’s what the hotel brands now want us to contemplate. In fact, they see it as the future.

“Whether you call it the lobby or a lobby lounge, there are smarter ways of using a hotel’s public spaces,” says Jay Stein, chief executive of Dream Hotel Group. “It’s the concept surrounding: ‘Is your hotel there for the community or just for the hotel guests?’”

Dream Hotel Group prides itself on making the lobby a place of excitement and events. “You want the hotel guest and the local community to see that energy, so you need fun things throughout the public spaces. We’ll have a mixture of permanent features – like a hipster hair salon that celebrities get their hair cut in – and popup ones."

Stein explains the synergies in today’s social media world. “We’ll bring an artist in and have a wall where they can do their thing and we’ll time-lapse it on social media. So we had James Goldcrown doing his graffiti art in one hotel – he painted the whole wall on Valentine’s Day – and then we got a famous tattoo artist who sat in the lobby that day and did free tattoos, but only of hearts.” Stein admits that he “had to get a lot of approvals from [his] legal team for that one” but adds: “The amount of social media attention we got off that was insane.”