Spaces · Kadıköy, Istanbul
Hotel Interior Design
Turnkey Design & Construction
Hotel interior design is the work of designing and building the lobby, corridors, guest rooms and bathrooms of a hospitality business so that they answer, together, the journey the guest follows from arrival to departure and the service routine the operator repeats every day. What separates it from a home is not style but intensity of use: a hotel room compresses into months the wear a bedroom spreads over years.
Our Kadıköy-based studio has run design and construction from one hand since 2015, and the number of projects we have completed has passed 94. Hotel and hospitality projects are among them; we have not yet published their images and credits on the site, and we share this work when we meet. The sections below set out the order in which decisions are actually taken in hospitality.
Our hotel and hospitality projects are not yet published on the site — we share the work when we meet.
The guest journey: from arrival to the room door
In a hotel the plan is set not by the number of rooms but by the order in which the guest passes through them. Hesitation at any one link in that chain casts a shadow over every step that follows.
- Reception found without having to be looked for once you are through the door; an entrance landing wide enough for someone carrying luggage to turn around in.
- The room number large enough to be read while walking down the corridor, and placed beside the door.
- Enough clearance to stand at the door with a suitcase and hold a card to the reader; and doors of facing rooms that do not clash as they open.
- The first thing seen on entering the room being the window or the bed, not the bathroom door.
The double duty of the lobby and the public areas
A lobby does at least three jobs at once: welcoming, sitting and, in most hotels, working. Someone standing in the check-in queue and a guest sitting with a laptop occupy the same volume; the real question is therefore not the furniture but the separation of the zones. A few metres, and where possible a change of floor finish, come between the moving band in front of the desk and the seating group.
Two technical points are often neglected. In a lobby with a high ceiling and a preponderance of glass and hard flooring, conversation turns into a drone; rugs, curtains and an acoustic ceiling restore that balance. The second is power: if there is no reachable socket beside the seating groups, the guest migrates to the single socket at the foot of the wall.
Planning a hotel room: the order of decisions starts at the entrance
A room plan begins not with placing the bed but with resolving the entrance hall. In most rooms the entrance door, the bathroom door and the wardrobe door all meet within the same two metres; getting those three to open without colliding is the first constraint on the plan.
- The luggage rack sits close to the entrance, at roughly 45–50 cm high and with enough freedom for the lid of an open suitcase to be lifted; without it, the suitcase ends up on the bed.
- At least 60–70 cm of passing space is left along one long side of a double bed.
- The socket and charging point at the bedhead are at pillow height; a socket that falls behind the bedside table goes unused in practice.
- Wardrobe depth is held at around 60 cm because of the length of a hanger; separate shelf space is allowed for the safe and the spare pillows.
The hotel bathroom: wet floors, waterproofing and ventilation
In a hotel the bathroom is a space that is soaked several times a day and cleaned every day. Waterproofing therefore does not stop at the floor: the membrane needs to be carried 20–30 cm up the wall, and within the shower area to continue up to shower height. A level-access shower both looks cleaner and is an advantage for accessibility, but it makes an uninterrupted fall across the floor towards the drain a condition.
In a bathroom with no window, a mechanical extract fan is not enough on its own; if there is no opening under the door for fresh air to enter, no suction develops and moisture settles into the grout lines. Ease of cleaning is a material decision too: reducing the number of grout joints, rounding the internal corners and bringing the taps out of the wall all shorten the time the housekeeper spends in the room.
Acoustics: what privacy costs in a hotel
Noise is the negative feedback most often voiced in hospitality. Sound arrives by three routes — the neighbouring room, the corridor and the floor above — and each of the three is dealt with separately.
- Walls between rooms are not stopped at the suspended ceiling but carried from slab to slab; the ceiling void is the most common leakage path.
- The room door matters as much as the wall: a soft-closing door with seals around it and an automatic drop seal at its foot cuts most of the corridor noise.
- Two rooms are not connected directly to the same ventilation duct; where that is unavoidable, an attenuator is added inside the duct.
- Footfall from the floor above is dealt with by impact insulation rather than airborne insulation: a floating floor layer beneath the screed, or carpet.
Lighting: day and night are two separate scenes
Lighting in a hotel room is not one scene but at least three: a soft general light that greets the guest as the door opens; separately aimed spot lights for reading and for dressing; and a control at the bedhead that turns everything off in a single move. If you have to get out of bed to switch off the light, the scheme is unfinished.
The night scene is thought through separately: a low-level guide light between the bed and the bathroom, triggered by movement and kept below eye level, spares a waking guest from having to switch on the ceiling fitting. A warm tone of around 2700 K is generally preferred in the room, while the bathroom needs a more neutral light coming from both sides of the mirror and leaving no shadow on the face. We have set the layers out in our piece on lighting layers.
Durability, maintenance and refurbishing with the hotel open
In a hotel the choice of material has less to do with how it looks on the first day than with how it looks in the third year. The measure is not durability on its own but renewability: if a surface is going to wear, it should be possible to change the worn part rather than the whole of it.
- Carpet tiles in the corridors rather than a single wall-to-wall broadloom; a stained tile is changed on its own.
- A protective rail at suitcase-impact height on the corridor walls and a taller skirting; these two details determine how often the paint has to be renewed.
- Abrasion resistance (Martindale) in upholstery fabric is chosen against the threshold for commercial use; washable covers are preferred on cushions.
- A record of the brand, code and colour of every item is handed over to the operator; being able to find the same product years later, when a single room is being refreshed, depends on it.
Refurbishment most often proceeds floor by floor with the business still open. That calls for the working area to be separated from the guest route and for noisy work to be fitted around the occupancy plan. The common method is to finish a single room before series production and submit it for approval as a mock-up room; the corrections are made in that one room.
Fire, escape routes, accessibility and regulations
These headings are not a checklist appended at the end of the design but constraints that shape the plan from the very start. The distance to the escape stair and the corridor width determine how the rooms are arranged; the swing direction of the fire doors determines the door details; the layout of detectors, sprinklers and emergency lighting determines the suspended ceiling plan. The flammability class of the surfaces on escape routes narrows the options too.
An accessible room is settled at the planning stage in the same way: a clear opening width at the door, a manoeuvring space beside at least one side of the bed in which a wheelchair can turn, a level-access shower and switches at a reachable height. Because the tourism operating licence and the star rating being aimed at affect the minimum room dimensions, this question is answered in the first meeting; we check the requirements against the regulations currently in force.
Translating a brand identity into space
In boutique and concept hotels, identity is established by repetition rather than by a single object hung in the lobby. The things the guest touches over and over — the door handle, the key card, the texture of the towel — tell the identity more strongly than any poster. Translating an identity into a space is therefore not a matter of painting the corporate colour onto a wall, but of working that tone into the texture of the material, the junction detail and the warmth of the light.
Where the issues that decide a hotel have come up in our work
Since we have not yet published our hotel and hospitality work on the site, let us talk here through the projects that are published. The two things that make hospitality difficult — that the space is in the hands of its visitors rather than its owner, and that it is used afresh every day — were the defining difficulty in these projects as well.
Privacy, acoustics and the experience of waiting came up in the Senkra Counseling Center (Üsküdar); visitor flow and the carrying of a brand identity into space in the Othello store concept; and surface choices that stand up to heavy use in the Duran Doğan Factory (Arnavutköy). These are not hospitality projects, but they contain a large part of what proves decisive in a hotel.
We have described how the process runs in our turnkey interior design guide. You may also want to look at our clinic and retail interior design pages, and you can see every type of space on our spaces page.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why can't I see your hotel projects on the site?
We have not yet published our hotel and hospitality work on the site; we share it when we meet. The clinic and retail projects that are published carry the issues that turn out to be decisive in hospitality as well: heavy use, durability, ease of maintenance and visitor flow — in both, the space is in the hands of the guest rather than the owner.
Do you take on a small boutique hotel of 10–20 rooms?
Yes — scale is not the issue, and the weight we give to the guest experience does not change. In a hotel with few rooms, being able to vary the design from room to room is an advantage; against that, resolving each room separately lengthens the programme. Running design and construction from one hand keeps decisions from being left waiting.
What is the most common design mistake in hotel rooms?
Setting the room up as though it were a bedroom in a home. Because nobody has thought about where the suitcase will be opened, it ends up on the bed; because the sockets are not at pillow height, the phone charges on the floor; the entrance, bathroom and wardrobe doors all clash at the same point. Every one of these is a matter to be settled at the planning stage.
Can a refurbishment be carried out while the hotel stays open?
In most cases yes; the work is taken forward floor by floor or block by block. The working area has to be separated from the guest route, and noisy work has to be sequenced around the occupancy plan. In projects where the services are being renewed completely, however, a short closure usually gives a faster result.
Do you handle the supply of furniture, lighting and textiles as well?
Because we run design and construction from one hand, the selection of furniture, lighting and surface materials, the monitoring of production and the installation all sit inside the process. What is different in a hotel is that high quantities of the same item are needed and that lead times set the programme; selections are therefore locked in early. Consumables such as towels and bed linen stay with the operator.
Do you follow the tourism operating licence and fire approval processes?
The application and approval processes are run by the operator, the architect of record and, where there is one, their consultant; that is a separate job. Our job is to set the plan and detail decisions so that they do not conflict with those requirements: escape distances, corridor widths, door swing directions, flammability classes and accessible room dimensions.