As you know, we love an exclusive at Hotel Designs. Joel Butler, Co-founder of HIX Event and our monthly columnist, explains all the exclusive details around HIX Works that will launch in November 2021…
As already established in this editorial series, HIX Event 2021 is all about understanding what your guests have just experienced in order to design your guest experience.
When it comes to our relationship with work, the ‘how, where and when? (and indeed for many of us, the ‘why?’)’ have been irreversibly redefined. The HIX Event will jump into these questions, mind wide-open, exploring how hotels can be our workplace solutions and destinations.
Following her recent involvement in Hotel Designs LIVE, Tina Norden of Conran and Partners, one of our four ‘HIX Works’ participating studios, muses that we’ve all had to design our own multi-use offices within our homes and have therefore become become designers by default, ‘Are we all now workplace experts, at least in our own little bubbles?’. And as we venture back to our ‘proper’ offices, Norden reflects on the ideals of a homely aesthetic, ‘having worked from home for so long, do we still want our office to be more like home?’
The HIX Team can directly relate to these questions. The event itself was conceived in a hotel lobby, we sold our first stand in an East End hotel bar (we lost the floor plan that evening but that’s another story), and our pre-pandemic honeymoon days were spent working in either Citizen M or the Hoxton, starting the day with carrot juice and finishing with beer, if we felt that we deserved it. A year later, the Waldorf Hilton and Herman Miller have partnered to create a luxury work package within the iconic Edwardian hotel destination, complete with ergonomic furniture design, state-of-the-art meeting facilities and a record player. As people now bravely step out of their living rooms, sheds and kitchens to re-negotiate the way that they work there will likely be many more hospitality workplace options to fulfil our varying needs and desires.
HIX will continue to focus on this topic as our conceptual deep-dive culminates in our ‘WFHotel’ session at HIX in November, hosted by Hotel Designs. We’ll explore four concepts, each presented by a leading hospitality or workplace design studio. These four big ideas will manifest as a series of seamlessly connected installations called HIX Works. To compliment this disruptive thinking, our exhibitors allow these design visions to become practical reality, with our edit of furniture, lighting, fabrics and technologies.
So for now, please do get back to work and we’ll announce the HIX Works studio line-up over the coming weeks, sharing our findings along the way. Whatever those findings might be, it’s clear that this work and hospitality opportunity will provoke consideration, creativity and opportunity amongst hotel operators and designers alike.
Head over to the website if you want to know more information about what other experiences will be sheltered at HIX Event.
Main image credit: HIX Event
