These contemporary hotel rooms combine multifunctional spaces with individual decor and borrowed residential interior and exterior typologies, to transport guests back home, while they’re away.

The Bermonds Locke Hotel, by Holloway Li, is designed to be lived in. Fully functional in-room kitchens and laundry facilities make sure longer-term guests are comfortable. Photo: Edmund Dabney

Living hotels: six boutique stays designed to feel like home | News

The Bermonds Locke Hotel, by Holloway Li, is designed to be lived in. Fully functional in-room kitchens and laundry facilities make sure longer-term guests are comfortable. Photo: Edmund Dabney

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No matter how long, how far or how restful a trip away is, one of the most relaxing moments of any vacation is when you get home. When every muscle in the body relaxes as you collapse into your own chair, greeted by the comforting features of a home you didn’t previously realise you missed.


One of the most relaxing moments of any vacation is when you get home


After the rise of Airbnb and other likeminded travel accommodation sites and services, providing real homes – or at least characterful spaces dressed up as them – to travellers searching for more familial home comforts, hoteliers, designers and architects are taking note, and implementing features that turn the hotel room into a home away from home.

Bermonds Locke feels like California (top), but the rooms feel like home (middle). The Stamba Hotel (bottom) with in-room home comforts. Photos: Edmund Dabney (top, middle), Nick Paniashvili (bottom)

Living hotels: six boutique stays designed to feel like home | News

Bermonds Locke feels like California (top), but the rooms feel like home (middle). The Stamba Hotel (bottom) with in-room home comforts. Photos: Edmund Dabney (top, middle), Nick Paniashvili (bottom)

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Here for a good time and a long time: hotel rooms with long-term livability

One of the most frustrating aspects of hotel-room living, is the constant need to leave the room. Many adventuring holidaymakers assume they won’t be there much so only need a shower and a bed, but filling up the vacation itinerary with constant activities can be exhausting enough, without heading back out for every meal and service required. The Bermonds Locke Hotel in Bermondsey, London, UK, may be designed to encapsulate the dusty plains of California’s Joshua Tree National Park, but the hotel offers in-room services much closer to home. ‘Designed to be lived in,’ explain the architects, Holloway Li, ‘each individual studio is equipped with a fully functional kitchen and laundry facilities, giving guests the flexibility to live in each room undisturbed for anything from one night to three months.’


One of the most frustrating aspects of hotel-room living is the constant need to leave the room


Rooms over in the Stamba Hotel in Tbilisi, Georgia, meanwhile, use the building’s former life as a publishing house as inspiration, with simple decorative and practical touches like brick walls, bookcases, comfortable sofa arrangements and in-room coffee machines making each room feel like a small studio apartment. ‘Up to 80,000 books are presented on widespread bookshelves across the hotel’s public spaces as well as in guest rooms,’ audit the architects, Adjara Arch Group.

Grzywinski+Pons designed all the furniture for the Leman Locke hotel, ensuring a comfortably holistic experience. Photos: Nicholas Worley

Living hotels: six boutique stays designed to feel like home | News

Grzywinski+Pons designed all the furniture for the Leman Locke hotel, ensuring a comfortably holistic experience. Photos: Nicholas Worley

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Room to breathe: hotel rooms with practical living spaces

Many hotel rooms boast of their designer-engineered multi-functionality, where writing desks become kitchenettes or beds even transform into tables. But having to tidy everything up before bed or just to leave the room isn’t the most relaxing way to live. This was the ethos behind the Leman Locke hotel’s interior in Aldgate, London, UK, where the architects Grzywinski+Pons designed all the bespoke furniture to work harmoniously with the space. ‘We wanted to avoid the transformer vibe of Murphy beds, retractable desks and flip-up tables,’ they explain, ‘our intention was to dispel the underlying sense of being unsettled, which complicates our self-imposed directive to inculcate the feeling of being at home while away.’

The Deep C Boutique Hotel exclusively offers large suites with separate living spaces (top), multiple bedrooms (middle) and private terraces (bottom). Photos: Alessio Mei

Living hotels: six boutique stays designed to feel like home | News

The Deep C Boutique Hotel exclusively offers large suites with separate living spaces (top), multiple bedrooms (middle) and private terraces (bottom). Photos: Alessio Mei

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Sweet suites: hotel room apartments

For single travellers or vacationing couples, a hotel room that positions everything within four walls is fine, as two competing activities are rarely enjoyed simultaneously. But families, especially those with young children, often desire a little more privacy and space away from each other, while still within the security of the suite. The home-like feature of separate living spaces is what often gives vacation home rentals the edge over hotels. The Deep C Boutique hotel, however, combines the best aspects of a luxury hotel, with its indoor and outdoor lounge and infinity pool, yoga room and sauna, alongside private apartment living with rooms that include open-plan living/dining/kitchen areas and private outdoor terraces, completely separated from up to three double bedrooms.

Samui Chaweng builds light into the architecture by positioning hotel lounges (top) and corridors (middle) outside, while each room features a private outdoor pool (bottom). Photos: Wworkspace

Living hotels: six boutique stays designed to feel like home | News

Samui Chaweng builds light into the architecture by positioning hotel lounges (top) and corridors (middle) outside, while each room features a private outdoor pool (bottom). Photos: Wworkspace

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A room with a view: hotel rooms with outdoor space

Another major difference between time spent holed up in a hotel room and in a more residential space, is the proximity, and therefore quality, of light and air. The bigger the hotel, the more it is inevitably forced to rely on artificial versions of both. At the Sala Samui Chaweng Beach Resort hotel in Thailand, however, ‘guests can relax in beds, larger than king-size, shaded by big trees next to the public swimming pool,’ explain the architects, onion. This is not a description of the resort’s pool and outdoor lounge, however, but instead it describes a collection of sheltered courtyards that intertwine between the resort’s rooms and other interiors. More private exterior spaces are provided too, as each room features a ‘private backyard where guests can relax on a circular outdoor bed next to a private swimming pool.’

+tongtong combines mismatched furniture and decor from a range of references to give the Drake Devonshire Inn an eclectic, familial atmosphere. Photos: Nikolas Koenig

Living hotels: six boutique stays designed to feel like home | News

+tongtong combines mismatched furniture and decor from a range of references to give the Drake Devonshire Inn an eclectic, familial atmosphere. Photos: Nikolas Koenig

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Fashionable individuality: uniquely decorated homely hotel rooms

The inoffensive, yet impersonal decor found in many hotel rooms brings forth the depressing realisation that the neighbouring room shares the exact same view in mirror-image, belittling the guest’s unique experience. Taking ‘aesthetic cues from a lexicon of references including the British country inn, retreats in the Hamptons, summer camps and southern Ontario’s farmhouses and cottages,’ introduce architects +tongtong, the Drake Devonshire Inn’s ‘guest rooms and public areas are teeming with doses of the Drake’s brand of idiosyncratic and mischievous personality.’


The impersonal decor of a hotel room can belittle a guest’s unique experience


The Drake’s interiors balance bright, contrasting surfaces and fabrics with mismatched furniture, fixtures and accessories from vintage fairs and antique markets, with the decorative result, even if not to a guest’s individual test, giving the hotel a comforting atmosphere of an eccentric relative’s residence.

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