Hotel Design 2025: The Studios and Visions Reshaping Luxury Hospitality Interiors

The interior design of a significant luxury hotel is one of the most complex creative commissions in contemporary practice. It requires the designer to solve problems simultaneously at the scale of urban infrastructure (how does the building engage with its street, its neighbourhood, its city?) and at the scale of the individual human body in private space (how does a bedside lamp feel in a hand at 3am? Does the shower door open the right way for someone stepping in half-awake?). The best hotel designers hold both scales in mind simultaneously and find solutions that are coherent across all of them — a quality that is rare and that explains why the studios whose names appear consistently on the finest new hotel projects command multi-year waiting lists and fees that reflect the genuine scarcity of their capability.

Yabu Pushelberg — the Toronto-based studio founded by George Yabu and Glenn Pushelberg in 1980, now operating studios in New York and Paris alongside Toronto — has accumulated one of the most distinguished bodies of hotel interior work in the profession. Their Four Seasons projects alone span three decades and multiple continents; their recent commissions include the Edition Times Square, The St. Regis Chicago, and Rosewood Vienna, each of which demonstrates their particular capability for finding a visual language that is simultaneously contemporary and historically sensitive to its context. The Vienna project is perhaps their most accomplished recent work: a building by the neo-Gothic architect Friedrich von Schmidt, originally constructed in 1872 and subsequently occupied by a bank, reinterpreted through the lens of 21st-century luxury hospitality while preserving the structural dignity of its original form. The result is an interior that feels neither period piece nor pastiche but genuinely new — a difficult achievement that the studio handles with conspicuous assurance.

Martin Brudnizki Design Studio, founded in London in 2000, has defined an influential aesthetic position that might be described as confident maximalism: an embrace of pattern, colour, and historical reference that operates at a pitch of sophistication that prevents it from tipping into kitsch. The Beekman Hotel in New York, the Brasserie Zédel in London, the Bath Priory, and the Scarfes Bar at the Rosewood London all demonstrate the studio's ability to create environments of great visual richness that feel festive rather than oppressive — spaces that improve with repeated visits, where a guest at the third stay notices something they missed at the first two. This quality of visual generosity is particularly suited to hotel bars and restaurants, where the environment's role in creating a social atmosphere is at least as important as the drinks or the food.