Boutique Design - March 2015 - 8

EditEd by Mat thEw hall

Starwood Hotels & Resorts' just-opened brand
innovation studio in New York has a two-fold
mission: immerse designers, owners and developers in its luxury, non-prototypical brands-and
to find new ways for its own brand, digital and
design teams to collaborate. To create digs suitable for all that interaction, Starwood recently
moved its in-house design studio in the city from
Varick Street to a 46,000-sq.-ft. space on Fifth
Avenue in the Garment District. The lab's look was
a creation of Starwood's in-house team and VM
Architecture PC.
While the Starwood Experience design lab
at the company's Stamford, Conn., headquarters houses working design studios for such lifestyle brands as Aloft, Element, Westin, Sheraton
and Four Points by Sheraton, the new New York
locale-dubbed Starlab-showcases the luxury
brands whose hotels are too locally inspired and
custom to sum up in a model room. "With St.
Regis, W, Le Méridien and The Luxury Collection there is no prototype-everything is bespoke
design," Mike Tiedy, Starwood's senior vice president of brand design and innovation, told
Boutique Design during a recent tour of the new,
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two-level facility. "What we try to do is use our
meetings rooms to express the values and positioning of each of the individual brands."
And those values are in the details-from a
curio cabinet filled with trinkets Luxury Collection travelers might gather, to a tea trolley
custom-designed as a nod to the St. Regis flag's
signature afternoon tea, to a bar evoking W's
cocktail culture, to mid-century modern-inspired
furniture for Le Méridien. "When we bring a
design firm in, we really want them to understand
the quality level of the materials, the fit out and
the detail level, but also how to bring the stories
to life," says Tiedy, a seven-year Starwood veteran
whose career includes stints at such high-profile
brands as Nordstrom and Nike.
Designers still have flexibility to choose their
materials palette while staying within the flags'
specific brand parameters. "There are standards,
but it gets interpreted for an individual hotel;
that's the driving lane between the guardrails,"
says Tiedy. But there are guardrails. "We're always
going to play a role where we're looking over [the
designer's] shoulder, asking, 'Is that appropriate
for the story we're trying to tell and the brand that

this is expressing?' What we found through experience-and one of the reasons that we have this
space-is that the more we can educate somebody [about a brand] early and up front, the easier
time we have on the back half."
In addition to creating branded meeting rooms,
Starlab brings the company's design, digital and
marketing teams together in one, open space.
"When we were designing the space we were really
inspired by the idea that we're working with our
digital people now," says Tiedy. "There's this digital
fluency that we try to apply to all of our projects."
That cyber focus is epitomized by a smart
mirror at the entrance that doubles as a digital
display, as well as a tiered, digital chandelier along
an internal staircase that pulls comments from the
brands' Twitter feeds. Similarly, in one of the Starlab
kitchenettes, five frames-one for each of the four
luxury brands and one for Starwood's Preferred
Guest (SPG)-display Instagram photos taken by
guests. And on a separate floor, the digital team has
set up the Tech Lab, a hub for keyless entry experiments, prototype testing and brand evolution.
-ChRiStiNa GREEN

C O U R T E S Y O F S TA R W O O D H O T E L S & R E S O R T S

BESPOKE BraNDS TaKE cENTEr STaGE aT
STarWOOD hOTELS' NEW INNOVaTION LaB
http://www.boutiquedesign.com
Boutique Design - March 2015

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