Column: Why hospitality must stop treating architecture as overhead

Monthly Column By Ed Murray

For an industry obsessed with performance metrics, hospitality remains surprisingly blind to one of its most powerful commercial levers – design.

In boardrooms up and down the country architecture and interiors fall under “capex”, “fit-out cost” or, worse, seen as “nice to have”. Rarely are they spoken about in the same breath as revenue metrics, brand equity or operational resilience. Yet anyone who has worked inside a hotel knows that design doesn’t just shape how a building looks – it shapes how it performs.

We talk endlessly about guest experience, but experience is not a service – it is a spatial condition. It is formed by how you arrive, where you soak up the atmosphere, how naturally you move from lobby to bar, how light changes throughout the day, how acoustics soften a crowded room. These are not decorative decisions – they are behavioural ones.

The difference between a hotel that merely functions and one that genuinely performs is rarely found in the size of the bedrooms. It is found in the public realm – the spaces that generate dwell time, social energy and repeat spend. A well-considered bar layout that invites lingering rather than rushing. A lobby that operates as a sequence of environments rather than a waiting room.

A restaurant that feels equally comfortable at breakfast, lunch and late-night cocktails – and, perhaps most importantly, comes into its own in that critical window between check-out and check-in, when a hotel is at its most spatially under-utilised yet commercially full of potential.

Yet design is too often value-engineered in the final stages, once budgets are fixed and programmes are tight. Materials are downgraded, spatial generosity eroded, the very qualities that make a place distinctive quietly removed in the name of short-term savings. The irony is that these are precisely the moments where long-term revenue is lost.

What we rarely measure – but certainly should – is the compounding value of design over time. A space that guests photograph and return to. A bar that becomes part of the local social fabric. A hotel that is chosen not because it is cheapest, but because it is memorable. These are not marketing successes – they are design wins.

When design is embedded early, alongside commercial modelling and operational planning, it becomes a strategic asset. It informs adjacencies, back-of-house efficiency, energy performance and maintenance cycles. It shapes staff workflows, brand perception and, ultimately, profitability.

For an industry that is serious about return on investment, it should become serious about return on design.

Written by Ed Murray, Associate Architect at Studio Moren