Boutique Design - June 2014 - 40

SUPPOSE YOUR FIRM'S 28-year-old project designer
gets to pick the hotel for the next trip to a project site or
conference. Would a Marriott be at the top of his/her
list? In the past, the answer likely would have been,
"Um, no." For the last 18 months or so, job one for
Glenn Wilson, vice president, Global Design Strategies
for Marriott Hotels and JW Marriott, and her team has
been to invent a design strategy that could change that
millennial's mind.
If brand redesign were an Olympic sport, that task
would have had a difficulty factor in double digits. On
one hand, Wilson and her hand-picked collaborator
Sarah Smallwood, a Rockwell Group alum who's now
Marriott International's senior interior design manager/
Global Strategies, Product Development had to develop
fresh visual cues that would infuse the essence of what
they came to call Marriott Modern into more than 500
hotels flying the Marriott Hotels flag worldwide regardless of age, footprint or room count. On the other, they
had to write a flexible playbook that could achieve that
without limiting outside design firms' creative freedom to
customize each property. And, as with any radical renovation, the time frame required a shift into miracle mode.
The design staff started this massive undertaking with
one big advantage: Paul Cahill, senior vice president of
brand management, Marriott Hotels. Tasked with
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boutiquedesign.com JUNE 2014

recasting this 80-year-old flag's operations, aesthetics and
marketing to speak to the estimated 80-million-strong
market of 20-somethings in the U.S. alone (an urgent goal
given 10,000 of the chain's bread-and-butter baby boomers
reach age 65 every day), Cahill advised Wilson and her
cohorts, "If what you're doing is not making us uncomfortable, then we haven't gone far enough."
Wilson and Smallwood did worry about the discomfort level (and, yes, they got some initial pushback), and
then they pushed anyway. Working to express Marriott
Hotels' new keywords-dynamic, polished, thoughtful-
in 3D, they began the brand's overhaul by knocking down
the old pillars of design: pattern-on-pattern fabrics;
spaces that were decorated rather than designed; rigid,
formulaic concepts and layouts; a buttoned-up attitude
to FF&E and an over-dependence on bright colors-
including Marriott's signature red.
"To be truly modern, a hotel has to be locally relevant and authentic," says Smallwood. "Red might be
completely right in Beijing but totally out of place in
London or Paris. The standardization of a certain
palette or matchy-matchy upholstery, bedding and
draperies summed up everything millennials don't like."
Pretty was out; handsome was in. Interior architecture is now the focus of Marriott Hotels' design. It's
meant to ground spaces, subdivide them and give them

There's not a thread of Marriott's
signature red in this Ocean View
Studio in the Rayong Marriott Resort
& Spa, Klaeng Rayong, Thailand.
Instead, the design team was free
to borrow both the palette and wood
tones directly from the surroundings.

GLENN WILSON

SARAH SMALLWOOD

VAN WILSON (WILSON); LANÉ PITTARD (SMALLWOOD); DAVID HOLM (RAYONG MARRIOTT RESORT & SPA)

http://www.boutiquedesign.com

Boutique Design - June 2014

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