Life After Design
An Operator's Perspective on Hotel Design
I have spent my career operating hotels, not designing them. I know what I like, and I would argue that I have pretty good taste, but I struggle with coffee lids, so I will happily leave the finer points of design to architects. What I do know is what happens to a hotel after the ribbon is cut, when the drawings have been rolled up, the construction teams have gone home, and several hundred guests and employees begin asking the building to work.
I have had the opportunity to operate hotels on opposite ends of the architectural spectrum. The Old No. 77 Hotel in New Orleans was created from five former warehouses, buildings that had already lived substantial lives before anyone thought to put a guestroom and a rain-head shower in them. Virgin Hotels New Orleans, where I work today, opened in 2021 and was purpose-built as a modern hotel. Operating the two requires very different relationships with the building. One steeped in history and brick dust, one sleek, contemporary and colorful.
In adaptive reuse, there is an element of stewardship. At Old No. 77, the building frequently dictated the terms. Cypress columns are where cypress columns are. Wood floors don't particularly care about your operating model. The irregularities that can frustrate an operator are often the very things that give the building its rich character.
There is a temptation in hospitality to solve every inconvenience. But in a historic building, you eventually realize that efficiency cannot be the only measure of good design. If you solve every oddity, straighten every crooked line and remove everything that complicates operations, eventually you may solve away the very thing that made the building compelling.
A purpose-built hotel presents almost the opposite challenge. At Virgin, the question is less what must we preserve and more, what can this space do?
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Modern hospitality increasingly demands fluidity. A space may need to function as a place for morning coffee, become somewhere to work during the afternoon, transition into cocktails in the evening and host a thumping DJ later that night. From the guest's perspective, those changes should seem effortless. Well, they aren't.
Someone has to move the furniture. Someone has to store it. Power has to be where it is needed. Employees, deliveries, dirty dishes, trash, glassware and linen all have to move through a building while, ideally, remaining magically invisible to the people paying to be there.
That has taught me something important about hotel design: the more effortless a space feels to the guest, the more carefully the effort behind it must be designed. And so perhaps that is where old buildings and new ones aren't so different after all. Adaptive reuse asks us what must be preserved. New construction asks what must be enabled. Great hotel design has to answer both questions.
A historic hotel cannot become a museum simply because we admire its past; it still has to work. A new hotel cannot be so committed to the present that it has no identity capable of surviving the next change in how people travel, eat, work or gather. Architects make decisions that operators may live with for decades. Operators, in turn, make thousands of small decisions that can either honor or slowly undermine the architecture they inherit. We are, in that sense, temporary occupants of remarkably permanent decisions. Whether a hotel began as five warehouses or was drawn from the ground up to welcome guests, opening day isn't really the end of the design process.
It's the day the building finally must prove that it works.