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Priestmangoode co-founder Paul Priestman uses lessons learned in the transportation industry to shift affordable hotels’ style into high gear.
By Mary Scoviak
Before Priestmangoode unveiled its design for Yotel in 2004, most mid-spend travelers would have been happy enough with a clean, no-surprise guest room. Paul Priestman and Nigel Goode taught them to expect more. Blending their innovations in luxury airline cabins, high-speed trains and product design—skills they’d honed since the firm’s startup in 1989—with the cool of Japanese capsule hotels, the 38-strong London-based design team kitted out a small room with high-end touches such as wood paneling, techno-chic accents that included mood-changing lighting and flip-down desks. This led to work from France’s giant Accor, including a revamp of Motel 6, Etap and Ibis, as well as commissions from Norwegian Cruise Lines for a new generation of studio cabins targeting young, single travelers. Now, there are talks with an unnamed high-end hotel company and a new office that just launched in China. Here, Priestman talks about invention, inspiration and the influence of the Gaia theory on his work.
HS: Priestmangoode built its reputation in transportation sector with high-end passenger spaces on planes as well as in product design. Why did Yo! founders Simon Woodroffe and Gerarde Greene ask you to design the first Yotel in 2004, especially since you’d never designed a hotel?
Paul Priestman: We had a very specific skill set. One of the investors in Yotel had seen our work on small luxury spaces in an aircraft magazine. Airline cabins are among the most difficult spaces to design: they need to reflect privacy, luxury and comfort in an open and restricted space. There is a very quick turnaround between customers, so everything needs to be easy to clean and the high level of usage means the materials need to be incredibly hard-wearing. The requirements of hotel rooms are very similar to those of airline cabins. The main difference is that you tend to spend more time in a hotel and you have more space to play with, which allows more flexibility. Yotel was the ideal project for crossing over into the hospitality market.
What was your diagnosis on why affordable hotels were missing the mark and the market?
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