Checking in: Designers take hotel style home
Published 5:14 pm Wednesday, March 19, 2008
When it comes to home interior design trends, few things are more influential right now than hotels and spas.
These escapes are special. They’re our homes away from homes, where we go to get away from it all, where, if we’re lucky enough, we go to be wowed by luxury.
Macy’s exhibits perhaps the best-known example of the trend with its prized, house-branded Hotel Collection, featuring “5-star luxury” bedding and bath linens with simple designs, minimalist ornamentation and subdued colors.
Most recently, the retailer has taken the concept to the next level with a new spa-influenced line — Haven — featuring 100 percent organic bedding with themes such as snow, mineral and rainwater.
Haven bath accessories include a long kimono spa robe and a collection of simple glass apothecary-style containers. Bath towel colors have soothing names like cornsilk, driftwood, ginseng, rice, rose-quartz and water.
Designer and TV star Christopher Lowell believes hotel style is sweeping the home interiors sector because it’s not too feminine, not too masculine. It’s balanced.
“Men and women now, together, are partnering on every single choice made in the home today,” he said.
Couples are looking to “boutique hotels, swank restaurants and their favorite watering holes” for design ideas, Lowell said. “What they are responding to are these flexible, nongender-specific, sexy spaces.”
Hotels, especially ritzy Las Vegas resorts, also offer a residential appeal, said longtime hotel interior designer Roger Thomas.
“I don’t want to stay in a hotel. I want to stay in a pied-a-terre,” said Thomas, using a French term commonly applied to small urban residences in Paris. “It’s like your little apartment in the city.”
Thomas, whose most recent projects include the Wynn hotels in Las Vegas and Macau, China, has partnered with high-end furniture manufacturer Edward Ferrell + Lewis Mittman, to offer a 26-piece furniture line, The Roger Thomas Signature Collection.
Thomas’ new lines mixes modern and traditional touches for a timeless look, influenced more by the 1930s and ’40s than anything else, Thomas said.
His Lombard queen-size bed relies on unpretentious lines and shapes with the exception of an elaborate tufted headboard worthy of a Victorian boudoir. The line’s Grenelle lounge chairs are also simple in design except for interlocking wooden circles that pattern the back of each chair.
“Our kind of luxury is what we call a ‘blue jean and blazer’ luxury,” Thomas said of his hotel style. “Everyone has to be comfortable in a pair of blue jeans and a T-shirt, and then, in that very same space, they have to feel absolutely at home in a tuxedo or gown.”
With hotel and spa influences spilling over into home interiors, it only made sense for Thomas to team up with one of his favorite furniture manufacturers.
“This is my biggest and most major line,” Thomas said of his new EF+LM venture. “I’m getting old and wanting to make more of a mark.”
Reporter Sarah Jackson: 425-339-3037 or sjackson@heraldnet.com
