Playland Motel. Via
Dancing in the desert, participating in an art installation in a motel or bunking up in a 17th century palacio – as travellers have shifted to become more eccentric, open-minded and intellectual, a brave new wave of experimental hostels, hotels and even campsites have sprung up to redefine the high-end experience. ‘Rough luxury’ thrives on authenticity and creativity to curate a connection to the creative class traveller, moving beyond the concept of the ‘designer hostel’ to imagine something with a greater sophistication, power and charisma.
If contemporary luxury travel differentiates by design, neighbourhood, artistic integrity and crowd, this accessible take on the evolution has the potential to blur the edge between high-end hostels and contemporary luxury hotels and push innovation at the highest levels of luxury. As Ian Schrager remarked at the 2013 Ministry of Ideas, “It’s not a narrow market but it appeals to a sensibility – not an age, not a demographic, not a price point – you either get it or you don’t”.
With millennials set to increase to 78 million by 2030, the taste for intelligent, cutting-edge and experimental travel experiences from younger consumers provides a clear indication of the demands of the next generation of luxury traveller. As Marco Nijhof, CEO of yoo Hotels, argues, “It is essential for hoteliers to become ‘in-keepers’ again…rather than simply offering a luxury label or star category”.
With every international city now home to inspiring and inventive hostels and budget hotels that are reinventing travellers’ expectations, contemporary luxury brands need to be prepared to stretch boundaries even further to remain at the forefront of the evolution. Design, once the fundamental differentiator between budget accommodation and the eponymous ‘design hotel’, is no longer enough to separate by, with hostels calling in both local talents and international designers to inject some edge into their properties.
Renowned design rebels Roman & Williams transformed a 1930s Art Deco building into the hip Freehand Miami; design practice Dreimeta won three European Hotel Design Awards in 2010 by mixing old and new materials for Hamburg’s Superbude; and an Icelandic film crew refocused their vision to reimagine a 1930s biscuit factory as the vintage industrial Kex Hostel. Similarly, Generator Hostels combine top-level designers with local architects for an updated design that retains the local flavour – Anwar Mekhayech from The Design Agency oversaw the recent launch of Generator Barcelona in this spirit, with further projects planned in Rome and Paris for 2014.
Superbude. Via
The impact of this slew of cheap ‘n’ chic designer hostels is already visible in higher end options like the Playland Motel in Rockaway Beach, which engages 12 artists and designers to ‘curate’ individual rooms on a seasonal basis, creating limited edition accommodation that is part sleep space, part art installation.
High-end hostels and budget hotels also aim to infuse the character of the local neighbourhood in the same way as contemporary luxury hotels. Berlin’s Michelberger Hotel updates the concept of lobby socialising for a younger, less wealthy traveller: its open lobby and bar area hosts bands and DJs that attract local creatives as well as savvy tourists. Meanwhile, the Daniel in Vienna incorporates an in-house bakery (and even a beehive!), exemplifying the trend for urban locavorism, where city-based brands source from the local environment to create an authentic experience.
Whilst the idea of neighbourhood integration is largely associated with urban properties, it isn’t confined to the city: El Cosmico, a high-end ‘nomadic hotel and campground’ in Texas that Beyoncé recently checked in at, caters to creatives and gets the best from its inspiring rural environment by designing regular workshops, retreats and concerts, including the annual Trans-Pecos Festival of Music + Love. The inclusivity fostered in the hostel environment, where segregation by style and not money reaches its apex, perhaps allows for easier connections with locals and artists that luxury brands must cultivate more imaginatively.
El Cosmico. Via
One area in which style-conscious hostels may have an advantage over luxury hotels is in curating a hip, creative class crowd. Although 30% of the workforce (and growing) is defined as creative class, not all of these individuals are at a stage where they can afford the upper echelons of the contemporary travel movement. For those that fall outside of this group, the balance of international-standard design and a local cultural scene offered by options like the Freehand or Michelberger are a seductive compromise. Even in areas where budget accommodation has traditionally been unable to compete, such as service, innovative groups like 25hours profess to ‘paraphrase service in a contemporary way, concentrating on service attributes important to our customers’.
Luxury hotel brands are already beginning to engage with this pressure from below; for example, Grupo Habita included a hostel outpost as part of its renovation of a crumbling 17th century palacio in Mexico City. Part of the high-end Downtown Mexico hotel, Downtown Beds invites a more diverse crowd to elevate the overall experience; as Co-Founder Carlos Couturier puts it, ‘our guests at Downtown Beds are both the young and not-so-young; they’re well informed, design-oriented travellers’.
As star rating comes to mean less than the uniqueness of the experience, the challenge for contemporary luxury travel brands now is how to differentiate themselves from these lower level offerings whilst creating a connection with the next generation of creative class traveller that they represent.
This post originally appeared at LE Miami and is republished here with permission.
The post Let’s Bunk Together: In Bed With Contemporary Travel’s New Genre of ‘Rough Luxury’ Hostels and Hotels appeared first on LuxDuck.