The Art and Science of Hotel Design with Vito F. Lotta

What makes a great hotel feel effortless? As hospitality strategist, architect, and owner's representative Vito F. Lotta explains, it's rarely the obvious design decisions. The best hotels succeed because thousands of invisible choices work together to create an emotional experience (while balancing operational realities).

Even seemingly mundane decisions ... shower doors, elevator placement, storage rooms, lighting, and soundproofing ... are a balancing act for both guest and owner. In this episode we talk:

• The psychology of hotel arrivals and first impressions
• The hidden operational side of hotel design
• The changing role of the lobby bar
• Can the guest room bathroom be saved?
• Authentic materials vs. practical alternatives
• Why hotel room phones still exist
• How creative teams overcome stale thinking
• Finding the "spark" in hospitality projects

Transcript

Meet Vito And The Big Idea

Matt Brown 0:07

Hi everybody, it's Nojo. I'm Matt Brown, that's Jeff Borman, and our guest today, Vito Lota, is a leading strategic hospitality advisor, owner's representative, and architect recognized for bridging the gap between design, brand integrity, and investment value in hotels. He is the founder of Lota Strategic Hospitality and Lota Hospitality Design. He's guided design at Hilton, Gensler, and the Geddes Group. But all that stuff, that's not really what he does. No, no, it's not. What he really does is challenge orthodoxy at every opportunity. He upends conventional thinking around brand and design. He kills off with glee the classic corporate hotel mold. That's one of the rare executives who is both a licensed architect and licensed interior designer. He thinks hotels should have personalities, not standards. For veto, hospitality is performance art, a dance deploying all five senses. And for veto, the human experience with all its clumsiness and joy and emotion and idiosyncrasy leads design thinking. Turns out clumsiness and joy are specialties of Jeff in mind. So we are in very good company today. Vito, welcome to No Show.

Vito Lotta 1:18

Matt, Jeff, thank you for having me.

Jeff Borman 1:20

And that concludes the show. Well done, man.

Matt Brown 1:25

I had to go big. I had to go big for Vito. You know, Vito, one of the things that we really love and brings us to doing this show with experts like you is people are so passionate about travel. And yet there's so much that goes on to make the experience of travel that they never realize. Thousands of nights in hotel stays, and they will not see it the way you see a hotel. When you walk in, when you get to that guest corridor, when you open up that guest door, you see something that very few travelers see. And I'm excited to hear and share what

Arrival Starts Before The Door

Jeff Borman 2:03

that would be. And so let's start with where you begin in a hotel, the lobby.

Vito Lotta 2:08

Right. So the lobby experience really starts before you enter the building. Originally, my focus on design was the arrival experience physically. We all know it even starts before the journey now. So people are building their travels visually and using social media and different sources in advance of making their decision and planning their trip. Whether it's going to be purely pleasure, you know, a leisure trip, or if it's going to be one of business, there's an anticipation before you arrive. Then when you are approaching the property or getting out of the vehicle, there's the first aha moment. Does it live up to the promise and expectation? And there's two major factors there. There's the physical, which is influenced by both the aesthetic beauties of design, there's weather control. Am I getting hit by a lakefront breeze off of Lake Michigan? And there's also the aspect of is there an opportunity for true hospitality? Are you being greeted by the team members there that welcome you as if you're coming to their home? And then there's that threshold break, whether it's going through a vestibule or a revolving door into the lobby. And always guide other designers and the clients that are we're designing for of saying there's that moment where you step front forward with the automatic revolving door doesn't sense your body anymore and stop spinning. And that's where I think people pause until then. They sort of feel brushed forward. And then you pause and you take a look around, you get your orientation. And the first thing is, do you have a an exhale of relief or a gasp of oh, made the wrong choice?

Luggage Storage And Clean First Impressions

Jeff Borman 3:59

What elements of hotel design are designed for guests to keep from seeing some of the ugly truths that are necessary in to create the functionality, or in some cases, maybe just to meet legal and structural requirements.

Vito Lotta 4:17

At that location, there's less that comes to mind at the arrival moment, other than where does the luggage go? It always takes up more space than you would imagine. And you want your bag to be right there. So how can everybody's bag be right there? And so having that bag conveniently there is inconvenient for the architect and designer to figure out where I'm going to put all that storage. There's also this the frustration, and I know this as in being so close to the ops teams, there's always a collection of leaves that are swirling around underneath the portcoch here or at the that vestibule entrance. So trying to manage those details by keeping everything crisp and clean because you're immediately judging how clean the hotel is and how clean your bed or bathroom is going to be on what you're seeing on that entry experience.

Jeff Borman 5:11

I've never thought about it from a design standpoint, uh, but from an asset management standpoint, right? Where you you're building something and you're measuring the return per square foot. And you're building something that uh especially where a bagdrop would go, that's usually some pretty prime retail opportunity.

Vito Lotta 5:32

Oh, it's a very, yeah, it's very high net value per square foot. One of the things that would always come up, and every time we would do a new build, we're thinking I have a blank slide, I can do what I want. The brand standards would say you need, you know, something like 15% of the representative event floor space has to be represented in storage. You've got tables and chairs and every all these other elements to store. And from the very beginning, ops is saying we need more storage. And I said, Right, we all know that you have this much event space in the program, and this is how it fits on the site. We can give you more storage if we have less event space. Well, storage space doesn't drive revenue, event space does, but event space needs to have the support of the storage, so it's this always this fight of what it's going to be, and it always comes down to yeah, I I cannot give you program level storage and give you all your event space. So you make the call.

Elevators And The Hidden Service Plan

Jeff Borman 6:34

You know, if if I could wave my magic wand, one of one of the most frustrating parts of hotel design is the staff using the guest elevator. Oh, and if we could just change that to De Vito, this would we'd we could change the world, the idea.

Vito Lotta 6:50

You have no idea how many projects, especially in Manhattan, where you show up and it's like, well, the per elevator experts and the and the brand standards of of demand and wait time, the amount of elevators you need per guest room is a certain number, and you need you need a redundancy. And then you secondarily you need the staff, uh the service elevator, and you want to because inevitably it's not if it'll go down, it's when does it go down. And they'll start out with no service elevator. It is just staff elevator because real estate is so tight and so expensive in cities like Manhattan.

Jeff Borman 7:30

There was a company called Carpedia, and they would do uh they would be hired by mostly hotel owners and mostly for studying like time and motion in the operation, uh, how to reduce uh staffing ultimately by creating a more efficient flow. When you're doing your design, uh how often is operational efficiency like that a guide? Do you do you get that from the start uh when you're creating space? Or is it more something that an asset manager asks after the project's done and they go, ah, we need to save a few bucks, figure that out and make it better?

Designing For Time Motion Efficiency

Vito Lotta 8:08

So those of us who are seasoned in the area of hotel design, we bring it up. As you mentioned, my role has been over the past uh tenure with Hilton and now in my private practice is being that guide, that whisperer, connecting the needs of owner, operator, team member, and the brand requirements into a hotel design. So when a designer who is incredibly talented, they're world-class designers, they may have done a few to a hundred or so hotels. They've got great experience, but not the same exposure as the thousands of hotels that somebody who's come from the brand or ownership side has dealt with. For example, the hotel lobby bar. What was a requirement of a lobby bar, but in many cases, that social anchor, that sort of living room to the hotel, doesn't need a bar. But the bar is a key element, whether it's in the the restaurant or in the lobby, as a staffing issue and efficiency. So the bar designed at night, you have it as this focal point. When it's in the morning, you don't want it to be a focal point. So then how are you making that transition to it's it still looks great and looks appropriate, but it doesn't look like something you're not supposed to pay attention to? At nighttime, you have all this liquor beautifully displayed and lit. In the daytime, not only do you maybe not want to see it, but how do you protect it? So that's where the efficiency comes in. How much time does it take to set up the liquor? And then when the evening is done, to break all it down and secure it, and then the next time put it all back up again. And if it is taken down and secured, what is what do the shelves look like when they're empty? So there's been a lot of creative solutions of how do you design to reduce that staffing issue of having an ability to lock down the liquor or to conceal

Lobby Restaurant Concepts Meet Union Rules

Vito Lotta 10:14

it. Another example that it is sort of a bridge in to the effect of union labor on design is working on a project in Chicago and it was a very large hotel, and they wanted to split the brand to two different brands, but both brands get to use the lobby. Then they're thinking, oh, well, maybe we should take the area that is currently a functioning restaurant that's at street level, which is prime real estate for retail, and not make it the restaurant. So maybe you can bring the restaurant into the lobby. Interestingly, we were already working on a concept of how you can design the lobby bar in a way that it morphs into a barista breakfast where you have a significant heavy, hot breakfast in the morning, but in the evening it comes back to a cocktail bar. So I love the idea. And they said we're gonna run to that. One of the challenges, of course, is getting if you don't have an actual dedicated restaurant, how do you have enough seating in the lobby that you can actually have an omelet in the morning? But the question then was where does the omelet come from? Like how much staff are you having in the kitchen preparing food because they wanted to have less than it was in the restaurant? And who do you have serving food? And if you have a cart comes out that can make an omelet, what are the union job description of the person who can make the food? Who can take orders, like a waiter, who can deliver food? And there was all these different job titles, and all of their pay scales within the union fluctuated within a range of one or two dollars. And the effect was changing the layout in the planning to reduce not only what the hourly rate of the staff member would be, but how many staff members there would be. The shocking thing in my mind, as I was trying to calculate, is I'm like, we're talking about four hours a day, and how many team members are we talking about? And and how many are we saving? And it's less than a dollar per person, these different decisions are to make. Where an operator is they're seeing the spreadsheet as a significantly large number. I'm looking at uh from the design side saying, is it really worth the cost difference or the delivery of experiential difference that you're going to have by enforcing this new solution?

Keeping Vision Alive Against Standards

Matt Brown 12:45

Well, how do you get stuffy design thinking off the board when you're working with brands? Is that ever a problem? You know, I would imagine you kind of walk into it's it's it's rooms, it's rooms of people with opinions. It very seems very similar to me to like a studio system, where you're a creator who's come in and I've got an idea for TV show or movie, and there's all these suits, and everybody's got notes. And those notes are coming from marketing and CFOs, and all these some of these notes are very legitimate. But your job is to kind of cut through one of your jobs is to kind of cut through some of that stuff and get to something original and something real and something that kind of evolves uh these concepts forward, and that can be a formidable challenge, especially in this industry.

Vito Lotta 13:26

I like to give the analogy of tending to a fire. If you've ever been camping and you wake up in the morning and the fire's gone out, and it's you could feel the heat from where there was the fire, but there is no more flame, and every all the wood's wet. And so now you have to work your way through those warm ashes and find that little spark and slowly feed it with oxygen and fuel until eventually you get back to a roaring fire again. You come into projects where there's no life to it, there's a project plan or PI that doesn't really make any sense relative to the real conditions that are there. The creative design team are prime with passion and vision, but they feel handcuffed right away by the requirements of their client. And the client is sitting in a position of no vision. So the first thing to do is to breathe the oxygen onto that spark, is get people to think in terms of why are we doing this, anyways? You could save a lot of money by just do nothing. So why are we doing anything? We have to have an understanding of what's going to drive a vision, and you have to fuel the vision. And when you do that, you have to push away issues initially of well, what is the scope? What is app? Because most of the time it's wrong, anyways. So when you start to get everybody excited about what could be, all options are on the table. And you start bringing in many ideas, of course, as you brainstorm that many of them are more challenging than others, and many of them are only food to leapfrog to the next idea, to the next idea to land on the really strong ideas. And as you bring it together, the role and a position of someone like myself is to start to guide it and see where the real opportunity is and to feed with more oxygen to those ideas, but let it be authored by others.

Bathroom Doors And Shower Water Wars

Matt Brown 15:21

Well, moving from air and fire to water, for 20 years I have complained to Jeff. Jeff's the main hotel person in my life, complained to Jeff about bathrooms. There is a theory circulating that while impractical, the doorless bathroom or the barn door bathrooms are popular purely because they are more photogenic. Is there any truth to that?

Vito Lotta 15:48

I don't think it's a photogenetic thing. And I'm glad we're clarifying meaning bathrooms in the guest rooms, not restrooms in the public area. When you're planning rooms and rooms are getting smaller and smaller, a swinging bathroom door is just in the way. So there are ways of doing barn doors to enter from the circulation area of the guest room into the bathroom without having issues of light leakage. You're going to have a little bit of sound leakage that's coming through, but you can you can keep um more privacy. And with proper exhaust of air, you're not going to have odors. So the barn doors getting into the bathroom are a good thing, but you you need to have a door. Um, when you get into the bathroom, then there's the shower. So I thought where you're gonna go is the elimination of the shower door.

Matt Brown 16:42

That no, that is part of it, and I don't understand why it just feels like water is always coming out. It feels like it feels like it's a step back in design.

Vito Lotta 16:53

Let's talk about the shower because that's one of my biggest frustrations that it is the same dialogue every time we do a bathroom. Where's the shower head? Where should the shower door be? Should it be a swinging door? Should it be a barn door? Should it be a bypass door, or is it any door at all? So let's address the any door at all right away. If you're in Europe, they are completely accepting no door. And they live with the fact that water gets out of the shower, and they live with the fact that there is an uncomfortable breeze of air circulation when you don't have a door. In the US, owners want to do the same thing because they look at the price of that door times the number of guest rooms, and we always reject it because it doesn't make any sense. Why would you want to be cold, the drafty space, and have the water on the floor? Door swings sometimes are a better solution. Barn doors, not a fan of those. Um opening on both sides, but there's a logic to it in some cases where the shower head is.

Jeff Borman 17:55

When I was inside of an asset management department for a while, uh, that I thought was fascinating as we were redesigning uh or really just renovating hotels, how much of an incentive there was to not renovate the bathroom very deeply because it's the most expensive part of a guest room renovation. And whenever we could not turn a tub into a walk-in or prevent a tub from going into a room in the first place, the cost savings to the builder and the owner were massive.

Vito Lotta 18:30

Right. But the reality is it's you may save money in the short run by not flipping a tub to a walk-in, but the demand of the guest is they don't like to see a tub.

Jeff Borman 18:42

Well, I mean the owners, but the owner doesn't care about that. And the owner is who puts up the cash.

Vito Lotta 18:46

Well, they do in the long run. So it's that sometimes it's like, you know, pay an hour, pay later. It's and that's why a lot of research has been gone into how to make it more cost effective, not only on materials and labor, but business disruption of how quickly can you turn a room by pulling a tub, dropping in a shower pan, putting the walls in and moving forward. One of the challenges has been that the solutions that are appropriate for focused service are solutions that are fine if you're on in a focus service hotel, but when you're paying a premium to go to uprupt scale and going into luxury, you're not wanting to see the wall panels that you would see in a Hampton in. Then you have to bring in a different skill labor to do proper tiles. And showers and baths are really getting to be very beautiful.

Jeff Borman 19:40

Yeah. Usually, at least from you know most of my life on the commercial side of things, it's the intermediaries like fine hotels and resorts that insist on brand standards that to be in their program, there will be a bathtub. And that bathtub not just has to exist, it has to be of a certain depth. Right. So you're right about the it's it's the high-end and it's really not the owner, it's the program uh or the channel that's often doing the mandating anymore to make sure that those bathrooms are as good as what you're saying they can be.

Vito Lotta 20:14

What we've seen is a lot of the larger brands are saying if unless it's an accessible room, the king rooms are all going to be walk-in showers. Right. And they want the double queens to be a very high number, too. Then the conversation goes to what about when you have small children? To which I'm still not a big fan of you can be a bit germophobic. The more you learn about hotels, the more you want everything to be extremely sterilized before you can use it. So the bathtubs are not necessarily felt by many people to be that clean. If you don't feel it's clean, why would you want to put your toddler in the bathtub? Why wouldn't you find a way of showering them? Uh, which is what we did. Um, but when it comes to tubs, then there's a cultural difference. And you know, that could be a segue to some of the different cultural expectations. Uh, in the US, people prefer to walk into a shower for the most part. They don't want to step over into a tub to take a shower, and they don't typically take. Conversely, when you're in markets that have a high volume in the US of people visiting from Asia, or if you're a hotel in Asia, bathtubs are a thing. It's absolutely important.

SPC Flooring And The Authenticity Debate

Jeff Borman 21:30

You know, if you could eliminate one hospitality trend in the last decade of design, just erase it from every property, what would it be?

Vito Lotta 21:39

Well, it used to be LVT, but fortunately, uh there's a new product, SPC, that is that is much better.

Matt Brown 21:47

And what and can we what is SPC?

Vito Lotta 21:50

SPC, so you feel the LVT is the luxury vinyl tile, which there's no luxury to the vinyl tile. And uh, you know, you'd walk into the room. You can see the undulation of the concrete floor telegraph right through how thin that was. And there was a lot of sound transmission issues. So the SPC has come along, so now it's a rigid plank. So it's stone powder essentially with plastic composite SPC to make a very rigid plank that clicks together. And it has a woodvener appearance that has gone from uh laughingly inaccurate to shockingly convincing. So it's become a much more reasonable product for the upper up scale. I wouldn't necessarily put it into the luxury category yet. There's always the fight back and forth between what is the real natural material that you know purists like us, architects and designers, want compared to something that is dependable, reliable, measurable, that is man-made, but having it be a product that is convincingly to the standard you would expect for either up or up scale lifestyle and luxury. I'll do a segue into a very interesting client that I have in Kyoto. They have a very immersive experience when it comes to staying with them. You're not just a guest, you are a you're welcomed as a member of the family, and you have an immersion into the culture of Japan and the tradition in a blend between traditional and modern design, where you're welcomed and living, you are learning traditional practices. So one of the traditions is the creation of the earthen walls. So the earthen walls, if you if you think about what you might be familiar with older buildings in the US, where you have wood lath in plaster, this is a essentially a lath made of organic material like a bamboo or reed. And then there's different earthen materials that are ground up, dry, and then made into a I would describe it but more as like a pace that you're troweling on. And it's a multi-layered process to create these earthen walls. So part of your journey as a guest is to get your hands in and make this in a workshop. We're talking about sound transmission issues and how do you control that between the rooms? And they were concerned about using the earthen wall in the new construction. And that point, I had to raise my hand and go, you know, trying to put my hat on as an owner and operator, I would warn you that you probably could build a more affordable wall out of drywall and give it the illusion of having an earthen wall than actually having an earthen wall. They're they were kind of shocked because me being a purist and as they are, is like, well, why don't we be pure? And it's like, well, what's the ROI of actually doing an earthen wall? And what happens when you have to do repairs? There is that always tension between what are the benefits of doing authentic materials versus doing a simulation of it.

Jeff Borman 25:21

Pretty soon it's just gonna be a hotel in a box anyway. An owner, you know, an owner's not gonna choose an architect or a designer, they're just gonna go to a website, make a few selections, you know. I like the purple couch, uh, the gray wall, and it's just gonna show up in a box and uh they're gonna pull one button and the whole thing builds itself. Uh, that's pretty much where we're headed anyway. So I say we enjoy this moment right now where we have quality debates about earthen walls and and and proper building materials.

Vito Lotta 25:51

Well, and that's yeah, I absolutely agree. And and that their property is one where you come into your room and the hot tub is already filled. Because each room will have its own hot tub and it may be outdoors, indoors.

Tech That Ages Fast And Why Phones Stay

Vito Lotta 26:02

Um, so one of the one of the trends you asked about that comes to mind is are you guys tired of hearing everybody talk about what technology are you building into your hotel?

Jeff Borman 26:15

You know, I'm tired of it from the perspective of most of the answers are irrelevant a year later. That's the part that bugs me.

Vito Lotta 26:23

100%. 100%. I like the way you said that because every time I would speak on a panel, they would go, you know, Vito, what's the new trend? It's like, well, let's stop asking about what the new trend is. And then it shifted to what new technology are you building in? And the first thought comes to mind you don't you don't want to build in a technology that's going to be obsolete as you're referring to right away. But you also want to be stuck with something that is not relevant technology. So that is the challenge. How do you decide what is something you can't build in that has longevity to it and can be upgradable, upgradable as far as reprogramming. But whatever it is, it's got an extremely short shelf life compared to the investor's life cycle of cap acts.

Jeff Borman 27:15

I mean, if it were if it were up to me, I would just start by not putting telephones in another hotel room ever again.

Vito Lotta 27:22

Well, let's talk about that because a lot of these things come up in every model room. It's like, why are we doing this? With the brand standards, the right thing to do, and this is what I practice is I'm not a great rule follower. So I like to go, what's the why behind the rule? And then let's just surf around that and do and the essential satisfaction of the why, but not necessarily the the what or the how. Um the phone in the room is something where you would think, Why do I need a clock in a room or why I need a phone in the room? I would argue you don't need a clock in the room. Everybody travels with some sort of mobile device that is their clock.

Jeff Borman 28:03

And it's always wrong anyway.

Vito Lotta 28:06

Always wrong. Or somebody else said it to wake you up at some ungodly hour.

unknown 28:12

Right.

Vito Lotta 28:13

Then there's the phone. So the reason the phone is so critical and it's it's always in the way and it's an eyesore is for emergencies. So there's that thing that you may have to call 911, you may have to call uh the front desk security, an ambulance, and relying on whether your phone works or not is too much of a gamble. People's phones die.

unknown 28:39

Yeah.

Vito Lotta 28:40

So that that is that is a key issue to have.

Jeff Borman 28:45

Well, Vito, you know, if I'll take us to the close here with one other real critical design improvement that is also entirely for safety. You have the sprinkler head in the ceiling of every room.

Vito Lotta 29:01

It's usually on the walls so that you can hang up your wedding dress on.

Jeff Borman 29:05

Exactly what I was gonna say. There isn't a hotel in America that hasn't had a guest room ruined by a bride or someone who hung their dry cleaning or their wedding dress on that sprinkler and set the whole thing off, ruining about a dozen rooms for a month.

Vito Lotta 29:19

Right, because it cascades water goes downhill. Uh, yeah, there are little hoods that they put on them now, so you can't hang on them. There's little solutions to each of these on the ways. Um I mean, I think one of the things worth touching on in this conversation is what are the legacy problems that we have in hotel technically that are very hard to

Sleep Problems: Light Sound And Airflow

Vito Lotta 29:41

solve. So the most important thing in your room is not only your opportunity to escape others so that you can have quiet and think or your own personal entertainment, but a chance to recover when you're awake, but also to sleep. And the biggest disruption to sleep is the fact that anytime you're sleeping in a new space that's not your own, you're very sensitive. You don't go into a deep sleep. I think Matthew Walker is the author of the book Why We Sleep and says it's when you're sleeping in a hotel, it's like sleeping like a dolphin, like one hemisphere is sleeping while the other one is on alert uh of the hemispheres of your brain. Sound is a big issue. It's not only can I control sound coming from outside the building, not so bad coming from adjacent rooms above, below, or or alongside you, but at the corridor space. So many hotels have an air intake that comes as replacement air to go to the exhaust in the bathroom that comes under the door. And even if you can cut off the light, which we all know disturbs sleep, if you don't disrupt the airflow, the sound waves is going to go around all that. So that is one of the many big issues. And I can give you a long list of things that disrupt your ability to sleep in a room. What's your experience been with that?

Jeff Borman 31:09

You you and I may have worked with uh this gentleman, an executive at Hilton, uh, who the first thing he would do when he arrived in a hotel room, he traveled with painter's tape. And he would cover up every light. He would seal the door for light. Uh the you know, if there was even a little tiniest uh bit of light coming from a power source anywhere in a room, and he would walk around the room maniacally. Do you know who I'm talking about? I'm not gonna say his name. Do you know who I'm talking about?

Vito Lotta 31:40

I know who he is, yeah. It is disturbing, it is very frustrating and disturbing. There's uh even this what I've noticed is the smoke detectors will have a strobe that go off. Um, the refrigerators are making a buzz noise. So I'm the guy who's trying to pull the FF and E away from the wall to unplug that refrigerator because I can hear the compressor at night. Wellness is, I mean, this this goes in the issue of the importance of wellness and hospitality. And so when people focus on the the important trend of recovery and wellness and hospitality, they're focusing on things like yoga classes or or training in your room or what kind of programs could be on the TV to help you exercise when you're away. Um, there's many very positive steps being made, but it's addressing these fundamentals of air quality, light control, and sound when you're trying to sleep.

Matt Brown 32:37

Yeah. Wow, we've been on a journey, Vito. Thank you.

Jeff Borman 32:42

I'll never sleep in a hotel room again.