At Home and Away

The Editors -- Interior Design, 6/1/2001 12:00:00 AM

Hospitality projects are booming in the design industry, but whether we are experiencing a period of true innovation or merely a fit of P.R.-induced reflux remains an open question. In this issue of Interior Design, we choose to emphasize the positive, with a range of projects finely tuned to varying spatial and cultural contexts. Practicality is obviously a crucial given here, but successful hospitality projects often depend no less on a vivid sense of fantasy. Some hotels are tailored to the frenetic schedules of a predominantly business clientele, and as such rely on expeditious service and neutral, or at least unassuming backgrounds. But the hotels that capture the imagination belong to an altogether different realm of experience—witness the exoticism and flagrant luxury of the Amanjena resort in Marrakech.

The other side of this month's editorial coin is residential. Hotels have gone through cycles of being billed alternately as escapist fantasies from humdrum home life or as comfy homes-away-from-home. Some of this month's residential projects seem to collapse the very contradictions of hospitality design: guest houses, beach houses, or Rafael Viñoly's "piano house." Often described as pavilions, these residential projects retain the desirable aspects of home even as they turn the domestic interior into a special destination in and of itself.