What a hotel operator actually asks for

Notes from seventeen years of designing for IHCL, Hilton, Marriott, Sarovar, Lemon Tree and ITC.

When an owner comes to us with land and the dream of a hotel, the conversation usually starts with the lobby. How grand, how tall, what stone. Those are good conversations and we enjoy them. But the operator who will eventually run the hotel is going to ask about something else entirely, and the owners who know this early save themselves a year.

Here is what the brands actually look at.

The guest room, before anything else

Every operator has a room standard: the minimum size, the bathroom layout, the bed, the desk, the way the wardrobe opens. Most of a hotel is guest rooms, so the room decides the building. We design the room first and let the plan grow from it, not the other way round.

At our Lemon Tree hotel in Udaipur we built one guest room full size on site before the rest were finished: real walls, real bathroom, real bed. The operator walked through it, we adjusted, and only then did the other rooms follow. One mock-up room is the cheapest insurance a hotel can buy.

The half of the hotel the guest never sees

Kitchens, stores, staff areas, laundry, loading, the route a trolley takes from the service lift to the room. Operators look here first, because this is where a hotel either runs smoothly or fights itself every day. A beautiful lobby with a kitchen in the wrong place is a hotel that loses money quietly for thirty years.

Numbers that are not negotiable

Fire separation and escape routes, structural grid and column-free banquet halls, water and power sized for full occupancy, the number of lifts for the number of keys. Each brand publishes its technical standards, and we read them before we draw. A design that meets them on the first submission moves faster through approvals than any amount of charm.

What the brand will not tell you, and we will

The standards say what the hotel must have. They do not say what will make a guest remember it. That part is ours, and it comes from the place: the Lippan craft of Kutch rendered in glass at Sea Leaf, the load-bearing stone at Madar Lake that lets the resort age into its hillside, sandstone and proportion in Ayodhya. The operator’s manual and the spirit of the place are not in conflict. The best hotels we have worked on are the ones where both were taken seriously from the first sketch.

If you are planning a hotel

Bring the operator in before the design is fixed, not after. Decide the room, then the back-of-house, then the lobby. And choose an architect who has sat in a technical-services review with a brand and knows what the red pen is looking for.

Hotels and resorts for IHCL SeleQtions, Hilton, AC Hotels by Marriott, Sarovar, Lemon Tree Hotels and Epiq Collection by ITC · Our hospitality work · Ask us about your site