The Staylist: EVEN Hotels & Wellness Integrates Design

speaker-0: This is Hospitality Unpacked, powered by N-E-W-H. We're diving into the trends, ideas, and people shaping the hospitality industry, from design and innovation to the business behind the brands. Today's segment is the experience, where design, service, and storytelling meet to create unforgettable moments. Hi everyone, I'm Kavitha Iyer with IHG Hotels and Resorts.

Really pleased to be here today and have the opportunity to share our journey of the redesign for even hotels. And we have some of our powerhouse creatives to my right who will introduce themselves. And we also should have our sort of a thanks to our partners, Chilano, who were also very integral to making this design come to life. But today's subject matter about this approach to design with wellness in mind.

So a lot of times you've probably heard of many conversations today that have talked about certain technical and tactical aspects of how you pursue wellness, know, whether it's the mathematical aspirations, the metrics, but that's not what we're going to talk about today. We're going to talk about something that's integral, very true to our own hearts, which is about design and how you think about design essentially, and how you map certain things that codify what your impressions are.

So I'll first start by introducing our panel today. So Kristen Freeland. speaker-1: Hi everyone, Kristen Freeland. I am the Director of Design Strategies with IHG and so excited to talk to you today.

speaker-2: Hi everyone, I'm Stephanie Reed-Stefan. I'm the Design Strategies Manager at IHG and I was the project lead for EVEN. speaker-0: Let's jump right in. So one of things that we wanted to start off with is, you know, as at IHG, just like in other companies, we have this sort of passion for the overall goal of sustainability.

So we thought we'd start there. This goal of sustainability, as you know, is multifold. It isn't just about the shape or the space or how we feel in the hotel. It's about the service operations.

It's about waste management. It's about efficiencies and energy. It's about water usage. And it's also about culture and our place in society for an overall ⁓ rounded way of what we're leaving for the future of and what hospitality plays in that role of our responsible point of view in sustainability.

So Kristen, I thought maybe you could take us through that larger picture of what IHG's journey to tomorrow goal is. speaker-1: Absolutely. Affectionately known as JTT in house. But Journey to Tomorrow is really about IHG's commitment to delivering more sustainable hotel business to our people, our communities, honestly our planet.

It's a huge charge we're making towards 2030. know, clue to ⁓ some of the things that we're focusing on, but really it's about having a positive impact on our communities, building a culture that feels diverse and reflects the world around us. And then things that you might automatically think of with sustainability like water conservation, being more responsible about energy use. I think, you when you look at IHG right now, we have hotels in over a hundred countries around the world, which is not insignificant.

We also have a very ambitious expansion and growth plan, which is probably no surprise to you. But when we think about that, really how we build and operate our hotels, we want to be more sustainable moving forward because We want today's generation and every generation afterwards to be able to see and appreciate the world and hopefully stay with us when they do. So we are working very hard because this is quite the undertaking with our owners, vendors, and really industry partners to really focus on creating more sustainable guest stays.

And that's what Journey to Tomorrow is all about. speaker-0: I love that response, right? It is about sustainable stays, wellness stays, and it's for the guest. And it inadvertently points to responsible design, right?

It puts you as designers in that seat of a very high order of responsibility. So rather than just putting it down in numbers and saying tracking metrics, you know, what kind of data can I collect? you for those of you who love numbers, right? Like what can I track in a spreadsheet?

My friend here is, is amazing at that. But instead of that and putting the onus on the market where we don't have adequate data and what I would call a more consistent way of representing what that data is, I think in the meantime, what we should do to address sustainability is to really approach it through this mantra of what can I as a designer do to shape this concept of wellbeing. And that necessarily isn't just in the product itself, choosing well. Yes.

But how does it leave a person feeling? I talk a lot about this and today I think this is what Stephanie is going to also convey and how she approached the design. So when you're looking at it, even through the lens of space planning or color codifying, what did even do to kind of get there? So Kristen, I think if you could first set the stage of what is that broader meaning of what wellness means from that vocabulary standpoint.

speaker-1: Absolutely. So I hope that all of you are familiar with Even, have stayed at an Even, will certainly stay after today's talk. But the brand was introduced in 2012, and at that time it was the first of its kind, a hotel brand centered around wellness. That looks like many different things.

Our philosophy back then was unpacking your best self. And it was very much a sort of supportive, encouraging, at times coaching type of voice and relationship we have with our guests. It was like, the apple. take the stairs, go to bed early, stretch.

And that resonated with people, but that was many years ago. So when we started this whole evolution about three and a half years ago, we had to really have some honest conversations with ourselves. Is that still wellness today? Are we sort of addressing the entire spectrum of wellness?

Are there people that we're not reaching or speaking to? Because for you, or for you, it might mean eat the apple. For me, it might mean eat the burger and maybe watch TV in my room and not touch the yoga mat. We want that guests to feel like they have a place with us too.

So we really did the hard work of re-imagining ourselves and trying to align best with our guests where they are today and where they're headed. So I think as Stephanie walks you through so much of the design work, it's really rooted in what we did. And this is just showing the logo past and present, but we literally touched every single aspect of this brand because we knew it was time to really evolve and talk about what wellness looks like today. speaker-0: So it's really about accessibility to wellness, right?

So there are many brands that offer wellness in a variety of different ways, right? There's ultra luxury, there's spas, there's things that you can go above and beyond. But what about wellness meeting you where you need to be met? And that's many of us, right?

That's me, like you. Some days I want a burger and some days I want to knock myself out running. But how do we do that and how do we shape those philosophies? Stephanie, you walk us through some of those basic fundamentals of what did we take?

Because most of you know, as we talked about sustainability over the years, people, and Stephanie's going to use this term, but she'll tell you how she uses the term, biophilia. The word I love, but it's not necessarily about show leaves, right? So how did you take this on, Stephanie? speaker-2: Yeah, so like Kristen said, we really started by thinking differently about wellness and this holistic approach, not just fitness, not just physical wellness, but really emotional, mental wellness, all the aspects of wellness.

So once we sort of aligned on what that meant for even, and that really was an evolution, we started to think about the elements in our lives that deliver on our wellbeing as humans. And nature is paramount. It serves a paramount role in delivering well-being to all of us. And so we really leverage ⁓ nature as our vehicle to deliver on all the sort of design principles throughout the building.

So a sort of palette, pattern, form. And like Kavitha said, biophilia is not a literal representation of biophilia. We don't have any big patterns of leaves anywhere. We looked at it sort of this.

micro, macro, you know, if you're looking under a microscope at a leaf, something that's more organic looking in nature and pattern. So that's really every aspect of the design principles were taken from nature. And this idea started to form of inspired by nature. And that's just what we held with us as we moved through the design.

speaker-0: So Kristen, I like that you talked about biophilia. For those of you who know the meaning of the word, it's really love for nature, right? It isn't really about pattern making. It isn't about the texture.

It's really not, you know, whether, as you say, see the prints. It's not the analogs of nature as we all know biophilia to be. So Kristen, I want you to tell me a little bit about your approach to color theory, right? I think that's sort of the biggest sentiment that we saw for years.

We went through this whole form of beige, then we went through this whole phase of gray, and then we went through this whole phase of blues, everything that we kind of think is mellow and universal to people, but aren't really hitting on the targets of how you want people to feel in different states of their journey. So could you maybe talk a little bit about that? speaker-1: Absolutely, and I think what you said there, how we want someone to feel, whether it's through that initial threshold moment where we talk about this, our design style is a breath of fresh air.

We want someone to feel that when they first enter our space. So what can we sort of wrap them in from a physicality and a color story to make them feel that? And then we want them to sort of continue on their journey and get engaged with F &B, want to sit and stay a while, maybe form a community with people they don't know that are sharing that space with them. So how can we start to punch in color that then signals that sort of vitality and activity and activation?

Then we continue along that guest journey, whether they're going to the athletic studio, what did that feel like? Or whether you're going to your room where you want it to feel more like a retreat. So at every step of the way, we always focus on that experiential aspect. What do we want someone to feel?

I probably asked Stephanie that 5,000 times as she was designing this, because lots of things are beautiful. And lots of things can work in a design, but you have to remind yourself how you want that person to experience it, whether it's their first or their 50th time. And every touch point matters. You can see on the screen, this is a collage of a small snippet of all the things that we were inspired by as we were sort of forming this journey.

But we talked about things like natural ease, wanting someone to be able to come into our space and automatically get it, understand that they belong there, that there's a space for them. So what do you do, you know, is it a 90 degree or do you just softly curve an edge? What do you do with color and texture? Again, to make people feel that.

And then from there, you can start to layer on things. You know, we talk a lot about vitality and this vibrant energy. How do you start to introduce that again to encourage people to come together in our space because that's what we want. And then we have these moments that we talk about uplift.

There are these sort of small pockets, these little bursts in your day. And for someone, it might be the piece of equipment they pick up in the athletic studio for someone else. It might be that amazing product they buy in the marketplace. But we've sort of added these small notes throughout the journey to really just punch it up and add those bursts.

So there was a lot of time invested into the philosophy that really, I think, set us up to design the beautiful thing that Stephanie created. speaker-0: I like this idea and most of you use this term, right? Journey shaping, which is essentially what you do in hospitality. Your guests follow through these various emotional states as they stay in the space.

And one of the things that for us, we used a certain format that we're representing here. This is by, this is a version of it. And obviously it can manifest itself in a variety of different ways as you see fit, as you approach even hotels. But in this particular variant that Stephanie and Kristen created, we like to think of this as a painting, right?

And actually Stephanie and I both come from the art world, which kind of helped us shape this language where if you see it through the lens of a person standing at, well, in Stephanie and my height, around five feet tall, and you look at it as you're standing right as you open the doors, right? Stephanie, as Stephanie always tells me, what is it that you want someone to emotionally be able to grab and get and feel? and have different signals. So maybe you could speak to what the signals do to you.

speaker-2: Yeah, we kind of leaned in as Kristen just called it the breath of fresh air that became our design style and So right when you step through the front doors, we wanted people to feel a breath of fresh air So there were kind of three key attributes that we leaned in to help people feel that the first is volume the second is sort of this perception of lightness and then the third is connectivity to the outside and so when we talk about volume right when you walk in there's sort of this beautiful balance of a double height volume that's then, it has floor to ceiling windows and then a balance with a more compressed lower volume at the F and B space.

And so there's this lovely balance between the two. So as you're having that experience as you walk in the door, you're then taking in the organization of the space. And everything is very straightforward. It's not hidden, it's not complicated.

The reception desk is directly in front of you. You can see. where you might grab your cup of coffee in the morning, where you might work later that afternoon in one of the seating areas. And so it's just a very straightforward, uncomplicated, you're not working to figure out where something is.

And then this perception of lightness, of course, we have a beautiful foundational palette that is light neutral. And that is really where we sort of built on these richer, deeper green blue colors, and then these pops of sort of coral that enliven the space. And the foundation is really laid by these light neutrals. And then lastly, that connectivity to the outdoors.

You have a beautiful sight line through those double height windows that I mentioned to the street. And then in your compressed volume, your sight line to our gorgeous courtyard through the hotel. And so not only are you receiving those sort of visual cues to the outdoors, you're getting that natural light that's coming in. And so that also brings more lightness to the space.

So all of these things are working together in balance to sort of to play on that experience of the guests. And then kind of the center of the scale, these balancing act, the center of the scale is really that reception desk. And it is this deep, rich evergreen that we pulled directly from nature. And it's kind of this nestle.

It's nestled in between the two. And so with the lowered light fixture, the rounded curves that Kristin was mentioning that we pulled, there's no sharp corners. There's no sharp edges. And so that's really where your eye rests.

And you're like, that is where I go to check in. In the public space, that's really some of those key attributes that we leaned into. speaker-0: So it's a study of volume, a study of silhouettes, and a study of the balance of color and tonality. And those can come together in a variety of different ways.

This is one variant of an expression. But this notion is it's not beige on beige. I'm not in this very comfortable zone of I don't want to disappoint anyone. You do have a point of view in terms of color.

Kristen always raps like But the idea is that you want to emotionally be able to shape speaker-2: you're representing today. speaker-0: sculpt a personal's emotional sense through these different facets, which again are very essential to how you would design. So if you have anything to take away, it's just sort of a 101 of really dig deep into how you want to emotionally connect one person to a space. And that's really accessibility to wellness, right?

It isn't something you have to discover. Kristin, I think we have a little bit of time where I'd love for you to touch on our respite area, right? Your personal space. What's that all about?

speaker-1: Absolutely. I love our room. I'm probably a little biased, but I think it is just beautiful expression of wellness and, you know, similar to what Stephanie talked about in the public space, like the rule of threes, there were three really big moves. The first one was how we organize the space.

If you have ever stayed at an even, we had the fitness sort of located as soon as you walked in the room. So on one hand, I see my stuff, I know where I can do my yoga, but at the same time, if I don't want to do yoga, it's in front of me, next to the bed, next to my stuff. And so the biggest move that we made in sort of re-shifting the room is we took fitness, we picked it up and we put it next to the window. We gave it its own sort of rightful, dedicated space that's washed and light.

And if you want to lay out or lay flat for 30 minutes, or if you don't want to do anything with fitness, you have a dedicated space. And by doing that, we were then able to really celebrate the other experiences in the room, like this sort of retreat bed and that moment of just restoration. We also could then sort of appropriately address the desk and the lounge space. So by doing that one move of just moving fitness, it really opened up the rest of the room for us.

The second thing that we did, again, talking about light, we have this one accessibility and activation of natural light, but also we made a really key investment at our headboard wall and we have this beautiful wall washing light that is fully dimmable and can be controlled at the bedside. that is something that we fought for because we knew it was critical to delivering that wellness experience. And when you think about your wind down or your wind up routine, having a light bedside that you can dim feels pretty critical for that.

So that was a major point of investment for us. And then Stephanie talked about sort of that color and texture theory. And you'll see here when there are no sort of overtly organic things shouting at you, but there's a lot of color, but it's. muted in a way, because again, we thought about how we want someone to feel.

And it was surrounded by things that are, you know, of interest and have depth and personality. But at the end of the day, it should be a restful sort of retreat type of experience. So those are some of our big moves in the room. speaker-0: So again, the vocabulary is not about contrast.

It's about hues and tonality. And again, this is sort of taking that lens of a painterly approach, right? The things that really mellow and soothe out the way we approach design. speaker-1: Yes.

And in the bathroom, you we started saying, I want it to feel like a spa. How many times have we all heard that? What does that mean? Also, what can we actually afford and pull off with consistency?

So we decided to invest in some really key things here. You'll see that shower, that beautiful tile, that patterning. Stephanie talked about that macro to micro. We did a lot of study around pattern and this felt really strong for us in the shower because we decided that was a moment.

We're going to give someone an amazing fixture. We're going to invest in that. showers around and they're going to feel like they're in a spa. Again, we also looked at light.

So we have a dimmable light within the mirror, but also your overhead is dimmable in the bathroom. Because again, when you think about the start or the end of your day, that felt really important to us investing in very key things and fighting for them, quite frankly. speaker-2: Yeah, those transitional moments in the bathroom were really, really key in both the living room and the bath area. speaker-0: Stephanie, think to kind of wrap it up to where you started this conversation of biofile, the love for nature, right?

speaker-2: The outdoors, know, outdoors clearly were key across the guest experience. We've talked about how they influence the design principles just in general, but even the space planning where we have intentionally placed guests at connectivity points to the outside. it really all aspects of the hotel, but something that we're really, really excited about for even is actually the expansion of the physical fitness and physical wellness expanding to the outdoor space. So we invest in this gorgeous courtyard, which all of the FF &E here is.

very clearly biophilic inspired, but we've reserved green space for physical activities or sort of mindful wellness meditation. And we've brought those opportunities for our hotels. If they want to do an organized fitness program or mindful wellness program, we've given them that space to do that. Or if a guest just wants to go on their own, they've got the space.

So we're so excited about all the ways in which Outdoor has really delivered, but. Really from a broader sense, what Even has done, we talked about, started out with JTT, the journey to tomorrow with Even. And I think what's really cool about what Even has done and what we have in our power as designers, we've used design as an agent really to restore those ties between nature and humans. And we've done it just by simply building a connection to it in our built space.

You've got to start somewhere and so that's a really great connection and we have the power to control that as designers. speaker-0: Beautifully put Stephanie as an agent to kind of deliver the experience, right? It isn't something overt. It isn't something additive and it's definitely not beyond approach.

And I think that's sort of our story for even in the evolution of even since what 2012 you said? And here we are. ⁓ but thank you so much for your share today. Okay.

All right. Thank you. You really appreciate. speaker-2: Thank you all.

speaker-1: so much. Thank you. speaker-2: ...gated learning about your designs.

speaker-0: That's a wrap on this episode of Hospitality Unpacked powered by NEWH. If you enjoyed the conversation, be sure to follow and subscribe to Hospitality Unpacked by NEWH wherever you get your podcasts. Stay connected with our global community of hospitality leaders by following us at Hospitality Unpacked or visiting hospitalityunpacked.com.

Until next time, stay inspired, stay curious, and keep unpacking hospitality.