Why Do We Want Our Homes to Feel Like Hotels? And Do We Really?

“I want my home to feel like a hotel.”

I have heard some version of this request countless times over the years, and I have always found it fascinating, partly because after more than twenty years in design, travelling extensively and staying in hotels across very different parts of the world, I would never ask for it myself.

My relationship with hospitality also extends beyond travelling. Earlier in my career, I worked extensively across hospitality and F&B, designing high-end boutique and luxury hotels, restaurants and the amenities around them. I have experienced hotels as a guest and worked behind the scenes to create the environments guests eventually experience, which has probably made me more critical of what we have come to recognise as hotel luxury.

I am exceptionally selective about hotels and resorts. Sometimes a hotel serves the journey: I need a very specific location or close proximity to a destination, and reliability and service take priority over whether I particularly like the interior. At other times, the hotel or resort is part of the reason for travelling in the first place, and I choose it because the architecture, landscape, atmosphere or experience offers something worth travelling for.

Very few hotels or resorts manage the balance I am looking for. Many luxury hotels still rely on a familiar vocabulary of hospitality opulence: patterned carpets, layers of upholstery, heavy fabrics, decorative surfaces, generic artwork and an abundance of materials competing for attention. I often find these interiors stuffy rather than luxurious, dated rather than timeless, and strangely impersonal for spaces designed around the idea of making people feel exceptionally well looked after.

Other people’s desire for hotel-like living, set against my own experience of the hotels I have stayed in and designed, made me want to understand what they are actually asking for. Because there are two very different possibilities hidden inside the same request: wanting a home to resemble a hotel, and wanting a home to recreate the way we feel when we stay somewhere exceptional.

The second possibility makes far more sense to me, and it raises a more interesting question: how much of what we call the hotel experience actually comes from the hotel?

Why Do We Want Our Homes to Feel Like Hotels? And Do We Really?

THE RESET. THE EXPERIENCE BEGINS BY LEAVING.

One of the reasons I travel is precisely because I actively seek a change from my usual environment. Finding myself somewhere completely different for a few days — whether in Bangkok, London or New York — allows me to disrupt my routine, step back from everyday life, see the bigger picture and reset. Looking at my life from a distance often brings a clarity that is much harder to reach while I am immersed in it.

That reset cannot be explained by escaping household chores. Many of the people I work with already outsource a considerable part of domestic life to housekeepers, nannies, drivers, cooks or tutors, yet travelling still creates a shift that none of that support can reproduce. Leaving home temporarily removes us from the environment where our work, responsibilities, relationships and routines normally play out.

DEEP PEAK — The Theory of Lodging

Leaving home changes more than our surroundings. It temporarily removes us from the environment in which our usual roles and routines are established.

Hospitality researchers C. Roberts, L. Young and M. Johanson developed the Theory of Lodging to examine the psychological experience of staying away from home. Their research describes a shift in behavioural freedom and expectations during a hotel stay, suggesting that people can behave differently when they move outside the environment in which their ordinary roles and routines have been established.

Research into restorative travel points in a similar direction. In a 2019 study of retreat environments, Clare Gill, Jan Packer and Roy Ballantyne found that novelty and engagement were associated with immediate restoration, while the compatibility between an environment and the person experiencing it mattered more to whether those benefits lasted. Stress encountered after returning home could diminish the restorative effect again.

Our homes inevitably become connected to the lives we lead inside them. Rooms hold memories alongside responsibilities; familiar surroundings remind us of routines, relationships, work and plans still waiting for our attention. These associations are part of what makes a home ours, yet they also explain why even a beautiful, exceptionally well-run home cannot offer exactly the same psychological reset as leaving it.

A hotel or resort gives us something architecture at home cannot reproduce: distance from our everyday lives. For a few days, we inhabit an environment without our own history attached to it, and some of the freedom we attribute to the hotel may come simply from having stepped outside the world we normally occupy.

This changes the original question considerably. If part of the pleasure of staying in a hotel begins with leaving home, reproducing the appearance of a hotel room cannot reproduce the experience. To understand what residential design can genuinely borrow from hospitality, we have to separate the effect of travelling from the effect of the hotel itself.

And that brings us to the most visible part of the experience: the design.

THE IMAGE. WHAT DOES “HOTEL-LIKE” ACTUALLY LOOK LIKE?

There is no single hotel aesthetic, which is precisely why asking for a home to look like a hotel is such a curious request. Some hotels are extraordinary pieces of architecture and design. Others remain desirable because of their location, history, reputation or service even when their interiors have aged considerably. A five-star classification, an expensive room rate and exceptional interior design are not interchangeable measures of quality.

This is where my own experience of hospitality design inevitably changes what I see. The patterned carpets, richly textured fabrics, heavy upholstery and decorative layering associated with more traditional hotel luxury can signal opulence, but they also solve practical commercial problems. Hotel rooms endure extraordinary turnover, so materials are selected partly for durability and their ability to remain presentable through intensive use. Pattern and texture can disguise wear and staining far more successfully than an unforgiving plain surface.

Operationally, that makes sense. Experientially, it can have exactly the opposite effect.

I am far more comfortable in a hotel where I can understand the condition of the materials around me. Stone, wood and other surfaces that reveal how they have been maintained inspire more confidence in me than ageing patterned carpets or layers of fabric capable of concealing years of wear. What one guest reads as visual richness and opulence, another may read as concealed dirt, staining or lack of hygiene.

The interesting point is not whether carpets are good or bad. It is how easily commercial practicality can acquire the visual authority of luxury. When the same materials and decorative devices appear repeatedly in expensive hotels, we begin to associate the appearance with the status of the places using it. Eventually the visual code survives independently of the practical reason that created it.

That is where residential design can get the hotel reference completely wrong. A private home can copy the visible signs of hospitality luxury while missing the qualities that made the hospitality experience desirable in the first place.

Some of the original commercial thinking is extremely valuable at home. Acoustic privacy, materials that age beautifully, excellent lighting, easy maintenance, temperature control and serious attention to sleep improve everyday life regardless of whether the building is a hotel or a private residence. The distinction is simple: borrow what performs beautifully, not what merely looks recognisably hotel-like.

Once appearance is separated from performance, another part of the hotel experience becomes much more important. The ease we associate with exceptional hospitality is produced by an enormous amount of work that the guest is barely required to think about.

THE EASE. A HOTEL IS DESIGNED SO THAT YOU DO NOT HAVE TO RUN IT.

A beautifully designed hotel room is only the visible end of a much larger system. Behind it sit housekeeping, laundry, kitchens, storage, deliveries, maintenance, waste management, staff circulation, concierge and service. A good hotel coordinates all of this while asking remarkably little from the guest.

The room is cleaned without us organising the cleaner; linen disappears and returns without us managing the laundry; food arrives without shopping, preparation or clearing up; and when something breaks, we report the problem rather than finding a contractor, arranging access and following up. The practical work has not disappeared. Our responsibility for managing it has.

That difference matters even for people whose lives at home are already highly supported. A housekeeper, nanny, cook or driver can perform work on our behalf, but a private home still belongs to us and ultimately remains our responsibility. Exceptional hospitality goes one step further: for a short period, the entire environment is someone else’s operation.

The feeling of effortlessness is therefore not decorative. It is organisational, architectural and psychological.

DEEP PEAK — The Architecture of Concealment

For centuries, architecture has influenced how effortless a life feels by deciding how much of the work required to support it remains visible.

Architectural historian Kimberley Skelton traced a significant change in seventeenth-century English country houses, when increasingly sophisticated planning began separating servants and household operations from the principal rooms and sightlines of the house. Traditional courtyard houses in the Arabian Gulf developed their own spatial hierarchies between majlis, family and service areas, using entrances, courtyards and transitional spaces to manage privacy, movement and visibility.

As domestic life changed, architecture changed with it. When live-in household service declined across much of Europe, the work of running a home remained but increasingly had to be performed within smaller spaces. Grete Schütte-Lihotzky’s Frankfurt Kitchen of 1926 compressed domestic work into an intensely rationalised room designed around efficiency, while the later rise of open-plan living moved in almost the opposite direction by bringing kitchens and everyday household activity into the centre of social life.

Hotels largely retained a clearer separation between the spaces guests enjoy and the operation required to maintain them. Behind the calm of a hotel room sits an infrastructure of housekeeping, laundry, kitchens, storage, deliveries, waste, maintenance and staff movement. We experience the result while seeing very little of the process.

Here hospitality offers residential design something far more valuable than an aesthetic reference. A home functions better when the practical side of life has been given somewhere appropriate to happen. Storage can absorb the objects that otherwise become visual reminders of work; kitchens, utility rooms and service areas can support the way a household genuinely operates; and the things left visible can contribute something pleasurable — books we want to read, art we want to look at, objects collected over time, flowers, tactile materials and the personal pieces that make a room worth inhabiting.

The point is not to pretend that everyday life has no work attached to it. Good design can stop that work from occupying more of our physical and mental space than it deserves.

Hospitality can therefore teach residential design a great deal about ease, but following the logic of a hotel beyond that point would begin to remove something equally important. The hotel achieves part of its freedom by knowing almost nothing about the personal history of the person arriving. A home becomes meaningful through the opposite process.

A great hotel is ready to receive us. A great home makes us feel that we belong.

BELONGING. THE ADVANTAGE OF BEING SPECIFIC.

A well-designed home has to achieve ease without becoming anonymous. It needs to accommodate work, family, possessions, routines and responsibilities without allowing them to dominate the experience of living there, while becoming increasingly specific to the personalities and lives of the people who inhabit it.

DEEP PEAK — Psychological Ownership

Belonging grows when a place begins to reflect our identity, our choices and the life we have lived inside it.

Psychologists Jon Pierce, Tatiana Kostova and Kurt Dirks studied the development of psychological ownership: the feeling that something is genuinely “mine”. Their research identified several ways that attachment develops, including having influence over something, seeing our identity reflected in it and coming to know it intimately over time. Research into place attachment reaches similar conclusions about the importance of identity, familiarity, memory and repeated experience.

Why do we want our homes to feel like Hotels? And do we really?

Experiencing a well-designed private home is fundamentally different from experiencing even an exceptional hotel room because a home can be shaped through hundreds, sometimes thousands, of decisions around one particular life: materials chosen because you love their tactility, colours that make you feel good, art and objects that mean something to you, spaces designed around how you gather with other people, places to retreat when you want solitude and practical elements concealed because you do not want the work of daily life constantly demanding your attention.

I often describe designing a home as a journey of self-discovery. The most interesting projects emerge when people remain open enough to discover preferences, habits and ways of living they may never previously have articulated. Every decision adds another layer of specificity until the home begins to feel less like an interior assembled from desirable things and more like a world that could belong only to the people living there.

Time then adds something design alone cannot provide. Objects gather stories, rooms become connected to family rituals, art becomes inseparable from periods of life and memories accumulate around the places in which they happened. The longer we inhabit a home, the more our lives become embedded within it.

The distinction between hospitality and home becomes clearest here. Exceptional hospitality can understand people remarkably well in general: how we sleep, what makes us comfortable, how much privacy we need, what creates friction and which needs are worth anticipating. Residential design can take that knowledge and go one step further by understanding the particular people who will inhabit one particular home.

That is why the best qualities of hospitality and the deepest qualities of home do not need to compete. Hospitality can teach us about anticipation, privacy, sleep, sensory comfort, service and the intelligent removal of unnecessary friction. Home can give us specificity, familiarity, identity, memory and belonging.

The mistake is compressing all of those qualities into a style.

When someone says, “I want my home to feel like a hotel”, the more revealing question is not which hotel they want to copy, but which part of the hotel experience they want to bring home. Is it the sense that everything has been anticipated? The absence of visible work? The quality of sleep? The privacy? The order? The service? Or the mental space that appears when the practical demands of everyday life stop competing so aggressively for our attention?

Once the desired experience is clear, there is very little reason for the home itself to resemble a hotel. Residential design can take the intelligence of exceptional hospitality and make it personal: removing unnecessary friction, anticipating routines, protecting privacy and giving the practical work of everyday life somewhere appropriate to happen. At the same time, it can preserve everything hospitality must largely leave open for the next guest — individual taste, memories, rituals, possessions, eccentricities and the gradual accumulation of a life.

A hotel can make us feel free because, for a few days, it knows almost nothing about our lives. A great home can give us that same sense of ease for the opposite reason: because it has been designed to know our lives exceptionally well.

Further Reading

Books, papers and projects that informed this essay.

Project: The White Arcade — D’Ora Tokai Designs

Research: C. Roberts, L. Young & M. Johanson — Theory of Lodging

Research: Clare Gill, Jan Packer & Roy Ballantyne — Restorative Travel & Retreat Experiences

Research: Jon Pierce, Tatiana Kostova & Kurt Dirks — Psychological Ownership

Book: Kimberley Skelton — Sensory Architecture in Seventeenth-Century England