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HBA’s latest hospitality projects in China reflect a market with a voracious appetite for cutting-edge design.
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By Matthew Hall
China is big business for HBA/Hirsch Bedner Associates, which itself is a big business, with 478 employees, 12 offices around the world and design fees totaling $56 million in 2007. Last year, hotel projects in mainland China accounted for 27 percent of the firm's revenues; commissions in Hong Kong and Macau contributed another 15 percent. Sixty-seven more Sino-based (China, Hong Kong, Macau) hotels are on HBA's drawing boards - a number that may well grow exponentially as developers and operators race to expand in the hospitality industry's hottest market.
HBA brings a unique perspective to its interior design work in China. The most obvious reason: It has a track record. In a market where a hotel cornerstone laid in 2000 suggests staying power, Santa Monica, Calif.-based HBA can draw on a 25-year history there. It helped shape one of China's first truly international standard luxury hotels, the 1,000-room White Swan Hotel, which opened on Shamian Island in Guangzhou in 1983.
Over the next hundred projects, HBA continued to evolve the form and function of world-class luxury hotels in Beijing and Shanghai, elegant business and conference properties in key secondary cities and now resorts in line with the increasingly high expectations of domestic and international travelers.
Shifting demographics and quicksilver changes in guests' preferences are defining the next wave of design trends in the world's most populous market, says Andrew Moore, director of HBA's Singapore office. The priority now is interior design that caters to China's rapidly growing contingent of twenty- to forty-something business travelers who are new to travel. "That means they are more open to new and unique experiences than their Western counterparts," explains Moore. "They're looking for design that's interesting and compelling rather than standard and safe."
As a result, hotel operators and the designers they hire seek to create what Moore calls "enhanced" spaces, such as guest rooms featuring individualistic floor plans and heavy infusions of technology; luxurious on-premises restaurants serving a variety of international cuisines; and lobbies that mix the traditional "grand statement" expected of such spaces (especially in Asia) with flexible seating that's conducive to small business meetings and social mingling.
HBA showcases these trends in the JW Marriott Hotel Beijing, located just east of the city's central business district. The exterior of the 588-room flagship hotel was created by Kohn Pederson Fox Architects, based in New York, with WATG serving as design architect and HBA as the interior designer.
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