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Padded Perimeter | Hotel

application

In hotel guestrooms, a Padded Perimeter is located on the wall plane that the bed abuts, and sometimes on adjacent walls and/or the ceiling. The upholstered wall, which occasionally manifests as an alcove, defines a "perimeter" denoting the boundary of the sleeping area within a guestroom's larger scheme. A Padded Perimeter is frequently used for alcove seating in a hotel's public spaces. 

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In a hotel guestroom, an upholstered wall serves as an embellished element to draw attention to the bed, thus giving the bed greater visual weight within the room. The upholstered wall is a separate entity than the bed and begins at the floor level; the Padded Perimeter is not simply an upholstered headboard.

When employed in hotel seating arrangements, the Padded Perimeter also encompasses one or more walls and functions to highlight a seating area that it may or may not directly be a part of. If it is part of a banquette, the upholstered wall is exaggerated in height, rendering it as no longer a seatback, but a veritable wall of its own. If the upholstered wall is separate from the seating, it stands behind the seating to draw attention to it and to identify the boundary of the seating area. In this case the upholstery often matches the referenced seating - if not in design, than in hue.

Chronological Sequence
Padded Perimeter developed into a prevalent restaurant Intype after first appearing in restaurants, bars and clubs of the 1940 decade.1 Since 1960 the practice in hotel restaurants and bars grew in popularity, as seen in the Hilton Inn's2 and Lauderdale Ruttger's3 restaurants featured in Interior Design magazine that year. The designs of these restaurants were not specific to hotels, though, so they are not considered the first examples of Padded Perimeter in the practice type.

Padded Perimeter did not appear in the hotel-specific lobby until the advent of the boutique hotel in the late 1980 decade, and it was not until the 1990 decade that it began to be seen in hotel guestrooms.

Philippe Stark was the first to design a Padded Perimeter in a hotel's lobby, and he did so in New York City's Royalton in 1988. The long and narrow public space, credited as the "most important lobby of the late 20th century,"4 helped to create the new genre of boutique hotels. Stark segmented the lobby's spaces in unconventional ways including lining the curved walls of an alcove with upholstery to create an intimate seating area within the larger lounge.5 Part of the space had matching upholstered seating along the base of wall, but the bench and the wall read as two separate entities (and not a banquette), because the upholstered wall began at the floor and extended to the ceiling. The alcove also featured a fully upholstered wall that had no seating below it. By padding all the vertical planes of this space, it identified as a separate entity than the larger space in which it was located.

In 1992 the Hyatt Regency Roissy opened outside of Paris near the Charles de Gaulle Airport. The luxury airport hotel's interiors were designed by Hirch/ Bender & Associates who appointed its 338 rooms to contrast with the aeronautical high-tech aesthetic of the building's architecture.6 Each room featured a plush Padded Perimeter behind the bed. This gridded wall was upholstered in rectangular segments that spanned the width of the bed and reached the ceiling.7 In conjunction with the like-colored bedspread, the treatment gave the otherwise generic room a strong focal point of the emphasized bed/ sleeping area. Adding a touch of whimsy, the designers substituted one of the upholstered sections for a framed picture.

Later that decade, the Grand Hyatt Hotel opened in Berlin. The interior designer Rafael Moneo also featured Padded Perimeter in the guestrooms. Like the Hyatt Regency Roissy, the hotel had an upholstered wall behind the bed. This wall, however, was wider than the bed and framed two night tables on either side of it.8 This iteration featured four large rectangular panels that rose from the floor to the same height as the top of the room's window frame. By extending farther than the bed's frame, this Padded Perimeter denoted a larger sleeping area than simply the bed and the space above it. This design began the shift towards larger and wider Padded Perimeters in hotel guestrooms.

In 2002 the Propeller Island Hotel, a boutique hotel also located in Berlin, featured only forty-five rooms. Designer Lars Stroschen created no two alike: the theme of each room varied from "conventional domestic concepts to contemporary and futurist ideas" creating a world of contrasting interior landscapes.9 In one of the more unsettling rooms, all of the vertical surfaces were covered in button-tufted upholstery - including the doors and their frames.10 The room's design, reminiscent of an asylum cell and flooded with green light, was devoid of decoration or furniture other than the bed. This manipulation of a Padded Perimeter directed all attention to the bed (when the sliding bathroom door was closed) and created a chamber whose only implied activity was sleep.

In the similarly sized Prestige Paseo de Gracia Hotel (2002), the ground floor featured a generous, symmetrical lounge.11 On either end of the space, identical Padded Perimeters visually anchored seating areas. The upholstered walls were made of six square panels, two-high and three-wide. The panels were tufted and made of the same tan color as the sofa in front of them and the rug below them. From the center of the room, the upholstered wall and the adjacent sofa read as one vertical element, and they, along with the rug on the horizontal plane, created the two-dimensional boundaries that defined the implied three-dimensional seating area as distinct from the rest of the room. Because the height of the Padded Perimeter does not reach the ceiling, it makes the seating area feel more intimate. The effect created is similar to that of an alcove, but without the enveloping walls.

In the guestrooms of the Gray Hotel, Padded Perimeter was one of the tactics used to define the bed as the most important element in the room. Opened in 2003 and designed by Guido Ciompi, the half-height upholstered wall extended well past the width of the bed. The upholstered wall in combination with the equally wide area rug adjacent to it surrounded and highlighted the bed.12 The similarly colored Padded Perimeter, rug, and bedding stood in stark contrast to the deeply stained wood floor, thus identifying the sleeping area as a distinct zone within the spacious bedroom.

Asia's first boutique hotel, the fifty-four room JIA, opened in Hong Kong in 2004; not surprisingly, its designer was boutique guru Philippe Stark. The chic JIA featured many of Stark's 's signature touches, including the traditionally styled, button-tufted sofa with silver painted wood framing. This iteration was reminiscent of the drastically elongated sofa used in his design for the Sanderson Hotel's lobby (2000). In the JIA, however, Stark devised another manner to make the sofa a celebrated element. He situated the sofa in a Padded Perimeter alcove that was upholstered in the same color as the sofa, and made of oversized, square, button-tufted sections.13 This design gave the lone sofa  greater prominence by its visual affiliation with the wall, and encouraged guests to utilize it because the Padded Perimeter implied a sitting area.

Marcel Wanders designed the Lute Suites (2007) in a small village outside of Amsterdam in collaboration with the famous chef Peter Lute and his namesake restaurant. The suites were installed in seven independent cottages that were once worker's quarters to the factory building that had been adaptively reused as the Lute restaurant. While the exteriors of the 18th century gabled structures remained historically accurate, the interiors were anything but staid. The suites ranged from 440-670 square feet and they featured lofted sleeping quarters. In one of the suites, the wall behind the bed was completely covered in button-tufted leather.14 This Padded Perimeter, unusual in both application and materiality, gave the relatively small loft a big personality and clearly articulated it as the "bedroom" within the suite.

In 2009 Jordi Galí designed the flamboyant interiors for the Barceló Raval hotel in the cultural center of Barcelona. The hotel's lobby, a "riot of color, shapes, and sizes," created an environment of surreal playfulness.15 At the rear of the service core, and facing the lounge section of the lobby, a curved banquette-alcove was comprised of a uniformly upholstered wall, ceiling and seat.16 The attention-grabbing velvet textile was fuchsia and button-tufted. The fanciful nook included an integrated bookcase on the left end of the undulating wall.  By enveloping the whole alcove in the same treatment, the pronounced space beckoned as a destination within the greater scheme, despite only having one bench on which to sit. The Padded Perimeter added a punch of color to the interior and visually linked it to the similarly colored chairs of the other conversation areas. This dramatic example was not the only Padded Perimeter in the186-room hotel's public space; the wall surrounding the reception niche was also upholstered, but in a grid pattern.

Into the 2010 decade, Padded Perimeter continued to be in vogue in hotel design, utilized in more applications than previously seen. In the President Hotel, Best Western's flagship in New York City, Padded Perimeters were used in both the lobby and in the premier suites named after United States Presidents (Obama, Reagan, Nixon, and Kennedy). The completely renovated hotel received some treatments more often associated with designer hotels, such as an alcove enveloped in tufted, reflective Naugahyde17 that anchored the end of the lobby.18 The upholstery, the same as used in nearby banquette seating, encompassed all walls and the ceiling of the recess, as well as the wall above the opening. Interestingly, and in an iteration never seen before, the recesses in the upholstery housed LEDs that made them glow, creating a light pattern on the Padded Perimeter.

In one of the President's largest suites, the bed was uniquely situated atop a platform and was housed within an upholstered alcove.19 Like the nook in the lobby, this space became a visually separate area that was differentiated by the four white upholstered walls.20 In this instance, the Padded Perimeter was not tufted in the traditional diamond motif, but a field of square units.

Conclusion
As evidenced by the final examples of Padded Perimeter in 2010, the Intype continues to drastically evolve as a strategy to manipulate space and to distinguish specific areas within a hotel interior-in both guestrooms and lobbies. Instances of the practice in the years 2005 to 2010 outnumber all of the previous decades' occurrences combined.  

The newest trend across the practice types for Padded Perimeter seems to be the element of enveloping an entire space in upholstery to give it a strong character of its own in contrast to the environment it is in. Not surprisingly, this has emerged as prevalent practice within restaurant design, but it has even been seen in hotel circulation spaces. The Standard hotel (2008) featured a Padded Perimeter corridor leading from the elevator lobby to its restaurant that had upholstered walls and ceiling in rectangular Naugahyde panels. With its emerging variations in addition to its traditional applications, Padded Perimeter is expected to remain a prevalent practice hospitality design.21

end notes

  1. 1) Cho, Jasmin. "Theory Studies: Archetypical Practices of Contemporary Restaurant Design." M.A. Thesis, Cornell University, 2009, 113-25.
  2. 2) Vienna Coffee House Restaurant, Hilton Inn [1960] Lee Owens and W & J Sloane, Interior Design; Anonymous, Architecture; San Francisco, CA in Anonymous, "Hotels Motels," Interior Design 31, no.4 (Apr. 1960) 138. ImageCrd: Stone & Steccati.
  3. 3) Restaurant, Lauderdale Ruttger's Hotel [1960] Frew & Squier, Interior Design; Charles F. McKirahan, Architecture; Fort Lauderdale, FL in Anonymous, "Hotels Motels," Interior Design 31, no.4 (Apr. 1960) 132. ImageCrd: Hedrich-Blessing.
  4. 4) Fred Bernstein, "In Memoriam," Interior Design 78, no. 11 (Sep. 2007): 232. 
  5. 5) Lobby Alcove, Royalton [1988] Philippe Stark and Freédérique Valette, Interior Design; Gruzen Samton Steinglass, Anda Andrei, Architecture; New York City in Fred Bernstein, Interior Design 78, no.11 (Sep. 2007): 234. PhotoCrd: Anonymous.
  6. 6) Albrecht Bangert and Otto Riewoldt, New Hotel Design (Barcelona: Lawrence King Publishing: 1993), 181.
  7. 7) Guestroom, Hyatt Regency Roissy [1992] Hirsch/ Bender & Associates, Interior Design; Murphy/ Jahn Architects, Jean-Marie Charpentier, Architecture; Paris, France in Albrecht Bangert and Otto Riewoldt, New Hotel Design (Barcelona: Lawrence King Publishing: 1993), 181. PhotoCrd: Anonymous.
  8. 8) Grand Hyatt Hotel [1998] Rafael Moneo, Interior Design; Boll & Partners, Apine/ Bögel, Architecture; Berlin, Germany in Gianluca Peluffo, Hotel Architetture, 1990-2005 (Milan: Federico Motta Editore: 2003) 123. PhotoCrd: Anonymous. 
  9. 9) Propeller Island [2002] Lars Stroschen, Interior Design; Anonymous, Architecture; Berlin, Germany in Paco Asensio, ed., Ultimate Hotel Design (New York: teNues: 2005), 325. PhotoCrd: Lars Stroschen.
  10. 10) Guestroom, Propeller Island [2002] Lars Stroschen, Interior Design; Anonymous, Architecture; Berlin, Germany in Paco Asensio, ed., Ultimate Hotel Design (New York City: teNues: 2005), 326. PhotoCrd: Lars Stroschen.
  11. 11) Lounge, Prestige Paseo de Gracia Hotel [2002] GCA Arquitectes Associats, Interior Design; Anonymous, Architecture; Barcelona, Spain in Paco Asensio, ed., Ultimate Hotel Design (New York City: teNues: 2005), 410; PhotoCrd: Jodi Miralles.
  12. 12) Guestroom, The Grey Hotel [2003] Guido Ciompi, Interior Design; Michele Pozzi, Architecture; Milan, Italy in Gianluca Peluffo, Hotel Architetture, 1990-2005 (Milan, Italy: Federico Motta Editore: 2003), 253; PhotoCrd: Anonymous.
  13. 13) Corridor, JIA [2004] Philippe Stark, Interior Design; Anonymous, Architecture; Hong Kong, China in Serena Narain, ed., Inside Hotels (Singapore: Page One Publishing Private Limited: 2008), 102-11. PhotoCrd: Courtesy of JIA.
  14. 14) Lute Suites [2007] Marcel Wanders, Interior Design; Anonymous, Architecture; Ouderkerk aan de Amstel, Netherlands in Rinneke Duysen, "Going for Baroque," Interior Design 78, no.1 (Jan. 2007): 228-32;  PhotoCrd: Alberto Ferrero.
  15. 15) Alejandro Saralegui, "Total Ellipse," Interior Design, Hospitality Supplement 80, no.8 (Jun. 2009): 102.
  16. 16) Lobby, Barceló Raval [2009] Jordi Galí & Estudi, Interior Design; Anonymous, Architecture; Barcelona, Spain in Alejandro Saralegui, "Total Ellipse," Interior Design, Hospitality Supplement 80, no. 8 (Jun. 2009): 102; PhotoCrd: Jordi Miralles.
  17. 17) Naugahyde is a trade name widely used to describe all brands of artificial leather made from polymer vinyl and coated plastic.
  18. 18) Lobby, The President [2010] Stonehill & Taylor Architects, Interior Design; Anonymous, Architecture; New York City in Anonymous, "Stonehill & Taylor Plays Up Politics at New York's President Hotel," Interior Design Online (Jan. 2010); http://www.interiordesign.net/article/485172-Stonehill_Taylor_Plays_Up_Politics_At_New_York_s_ President_Hotel.php. (Accessed Aug. 15, 2010); PhotoCrd: Stonehill & Taylor Architects and Planners.
  19. 19) Site Visit, Nathan Wasliewski; The President [2010] Stonehill & Taylor Architects, Interior Design; Anonymous, Architecture; New York City;. PhotoCrd: Nathan Wasliewski, Intypes Project (May 2010).
  20. 20) Suite, The President [2010] Stonehill & Taylor Architects, Interior Design; Anonymous, Architecture; New York City. PhotoCrd: Nathan Wasliewski, Intypes Project (May 2010).
  21. 21) Evidence for the archetypical use and the chronological sequence of Harlequin in hotels was developed from the following sources: 1980 Lobby Alcove, Royalton [1988] Philippe Stark and Freédérique Valette, Interior Design; Gruzen Samton Steinglass, Anda Andrei, Architecture; New York City in Fred Bernstein, Interior Design 78, no.11 (Sep. 2007): 234. PhotoCrd: Anonymous / 1990 Guestroom, Hyatt Regency Roissy [1992] Hirsch/ Bender & Associates, Interior Design; Murphy/ Jahn Architects, Jean-Marie Charpentier, Architecture; Paris, France in Albrecht Bangert and Otto Riewoldt, New Hotel Design (Barcelona: Lawrence King Publishing: 1993), 181. PhotoCrd: Anonymous.; Guestroom Detail, Grand Hyatt Hotel [1998] Rafael Moneo, Interior Design; Boll & Partners, Apine/ Bögel, Architecture; Berlin, Germany in Gianluca Peluffo, Hotel Architetture, 1990-2005 (Milan, Italy: Federico Motta Editore: 2003) 123. PhotoCrd: Anonymous / 2000 Guestroom, Propeller Island [2002] Lars Stroschen, Interior Design; Anonymous, Architecture; Berlin, Germany in Paco Asensio, ed., Ultimate Hotel Design (New York City: teNues: 2005), 326. PhotoCrd: Lars Stroschen.; Lounge, Prestige Paseo de Gracia Hotel [2002] GCA Arquitectes Associats, Interior Design; Anonymous, Architecture; Barcelona, Spain in Paco Asensio, ed., Ultimate Hotel Design, 410; PhotoCrd: Jodi Miralles.; Guestroom, The Grey Hotel [2003] Guido Ciompi, Interior Design; Michele Pozzi, Architecture; Milan, Italy in Gianluca Peluffo, Hotel Architetture, 1990-2005 (Milan, Italy: Federico Motta Editore: 2003), 253; PhotoCrd: Anonymous.; Corridor, JIA [2004] Philippe Stark, Interior Design; Anonymous, Architecture; Hong Kong, China in Serena Narain, ed., Inside Hotels (Singapore: Page One Publishing Private Limited: 2008), 105. PhotoCrd: Courtesy of JIA.; Suite, Lute Suites [2007] Marcel Wanders, Interior Design; Anonymous, Architecture; Ouderkerk aan de Amstel, Netherlands in Rinneke Duysen, "Going for Baroque," Interior Design 78, no.1 (Jan. 2007): 230. PhotoCrd: Alberto Ferrero.; Lobby, Barceló Raval [2009] Jordi Galí & Estudi, Interior Design; Anonymous, Architecture; Barcelona, Spain in Alejandro Saralegui, "Total Ellipse," Interior Design, Hospitality Supplement 80, no. 8 (Jun. 2009): 102; PhotoCrd: Jordi Miralles.; Corridor, The Standard [2008] Todd Schliemann, Polshek Partnership, Interior Design; Todd Schliemann, Polshek Partnership, Architecture; New York City; PhotoCrd: Nathan Wasliewski, Intypes Project (May 2010). 2010 Lobby, The President [2010] Stonehill & Taylor Architects, Interior Design; Anonymous, Architecture; New York City in Anonymous, "Stonehill & Taylor Plays Up Politics at New York's President Hotel," Interior Design Online (Jan. 2010); http://www.interiordesign.net/article/485172-Stonehill_Taylor_Plays_Up_Politics_At_New_York_s_ President_Hotel.php. (Accessed Aug. 15, 2010); PhotoCrd: Stonehill & Taylor Architects and Planners.; Suite, The President [2010] Stonehill & Taylor Architects, Interior Design; Anonymous, Architecture; New York City. PhotoCrd: Nathan Wasliewski, Intypes Project (May 2010).