The hospitality design trend making everyone feel at home
Restaurant, hotel and bar design is increasingly looking to residential interiors for inspiration
6 min
There’s not many part of our lives that have been left untouched by the pandemic. But while many aspects, like the lockdowns designed to manage exposure to COVID have been hard to live with, there have been some positive changes too. Notably, as offices closed and everyone started working from home, the traditional division between the two spheres started to break down. And while hospitality services in city centres saw patronage slow and even disappear, suburban cafes, bars and restaurants grew in popularity as customers looked to stay close to home and support local business.
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Creative director of leading interior design firm YSG Studio, Yasmine Saleh Ghoniem, says although hospitality businesses undeniably suffered during the pandemic, it has reframed the way many patrons enjoy and use their local restaurants, bars and cafes.
“Since lockdowns ended, I’m noticing Sydneysiders are following this notion of loyalty to their ’hood which, until now, was more a Melbourne thing,” she says. “I suppose it’s evolved from ordering in from your local to support it during tough times.
“Hospo owners are increasingly offering a range of experiences to encourage locals in particular to frequent their venue, treating it like it’s an extension of their home.”
Borrowing from residential design to inform restaurant and bar design was already in evidence prior to the ‘work from home’ phenomenon, but COVID accelerated the design trend so that the lines have become increasingly blurred.
Bars with comfortable, or careworn, sofas and cafes with mismatched lounge chairs, well-padded banquettes and layered textures have become the go-to options for designers.
Ghoniem says clients are now regularly cherry picking from both sides of the fence to create sophistication at home or warm and inviting spaces in hospitality environments to offer a level of subtlety and individuality. Bedroom suites resemble hotel rooms and dining spaces echo restaurant and cafe style. Even the home kitchen has not been spared.
“Let’s not forget the home bar,” Ghoniem says. “Lockdowns are well and truly over, but the habit of making a cocktail after work is here to stay. We’re incorporating them in dining rooms and kitchens with gorgeous stone selections and integrated downlights to really show off the merch as they’ve become the social magnets of the home.”
The result is greater attention is being paid to materiality, from the rough texture of brick, to the reflective surfaces of Venetian plaster and Pandamo-finished micro cement, which Ghoniem used on a recent project with Four Pillars Laboratory in Surry Hills.
A good lighting design is key to tying the whole look together, as well as complying with the necessary OH&S requirements.
“Interestingly, the role (of lighting) in both resi and hospo spaces is becoming more aligned,” she says. “We’re all after less bright and more introspective lighting. We’re even staging home kitchens now with key focuses on beautiful stone surfaces or joinery details.
“I’m all up for immortalising moods and lighting plays a key role in stirring them so that spaces never feel brand new and instead seem layered by experiences – the patinas of time.”
Celebrated UK designer Tom Dixon visited Australia and New Zealand in March to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his design studio. He has been closely observing changes in the way we live, work and dine out for more than a decade, as tech advances allowed us to work remotely and, in turn, shaped what we expected from public and private interior spaces.
“I noticed the evolution 12 or 13 years ago at Shoreditch House in London, which was for daytime networking and night time entertaining, so we did a design which was always intended to be adaptable,” he says. “As wireless communication became more common, people started taking club memberships (there) to create a basis for their office because they preferred to work in a group setting rather than be in an office. It’s somewhere they could get good service, decent food and where they could bleed work into play.”
Dixon designed the lobby and Market Hall of Sydney’s Quay Quarter Tower, which last year was named World Building of the Year at the World Architecture Festival. He says the greatest design differences between residential and hospitality design are the number of ‘clients’ to consider.
“It was quite challenging to predict with Quay Quarter Tower, mainly because they didn’t know who the tenants would be to begin with,” he says. “They didn’t know the level of security that would be required so we were always trying to make it a bit flexible and neutral enough to accommodate a range of people. It’s always complicated with those public/private interactions but it was never going to be a fixed use, static design.”
Now, he says, all interior spaces, whether they are homes, restaurants, hotels or offices are required to provide greater flexibility, both in terms of functionality, as well as design.
“It doesn’t matter whether it is work, hotels or home environments, everybody is being forced to use spaces in multiple ways than before COVID,” Dixon says. “Home is interesting because it became partly school, partly office during the day, so it had to become a lot more adaptable.
“COVID has put a lot of pressure on home and removed pressure from the office, so that it is more adaptable and less formal and there’s less of a division of space.”
Directors of award-winning design and architecture studio Luchetti Krelle, Rachel Luchetti and Stuart Krelle chose early on to focus their practice on hospitality design to stretch their creativity, but in recent years there’s been increasing interest from an unexpected quarter.
“We didn’t do a lot of residential because too many of our clients wanted to play it safe and consider (their property’s) resale value,” Luchetti. “Under those circumstances, you can’t put your personality into the space or enjoy that aspect of going all out. But now that we focus on hospitality, we get so many enquiries from people who have been to a restaurant we have designed asking if we will work on their house.
“People want to go out on a limb in residential design as well.”
The pair are responsible for a number of interior design fit-outs in NSW and Victoria, including Tattersalls Armidale, Ovolo Hotel South Yarra, Bathers Pavilion Restaurant at Balmoral, Matinee cafe in Marrickville and Redbird Restaurant in inner city Redfern.
Luchetti also points to COVID for the growing numbers of homeowners looking to replicate the moody, layered looks of restaurants, bars and cafes as the opportunities to go out diminished and everyone focused on their residential spaces.
“You want that sense of escape and, for a lot of people, that was where the residential boom to make your home a sanctuary came from,” she says. “People started looking for bigger places and getting that work/life balance, entertaining at home became big again.”
Private spaces within a wider residential setting became a priority with everyone at home together for longer periods of time. And with travel on hold, demand increased for hotel-like experiences at home.
“There’s two schools of thought with hotel design,” Luchetti says. “One of them is that you want it to be more like a home and the other is that it should be completely like nothing you have at home.
“People are looking for that calm, clutter free environment that you can’t achieve at home.”
More: ysg.studio; luchettikrelle.com; tomdixon.net
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Randy Boyagoda’s new novel, “Lords of Serendipity,” delivers a biting satire of cheating, politics and dysfunction across modern universities.
5 min
Administrative cowardice. Rampant cheating. The soaking and scamming of undergrads and grad students. Performative wokeism. Intensifying competition for international tuition dollars from an expansive China.
These are either the latest dire headlines about American higher ed or the myriad subplots of “Lords of Serendipity,” an ambitious new novel by Randy Boyagoda. Unlike most campus fiction, its scope extends well beyond the cloister of the liberal arts classroom to whammy the entire university system, from its financial model to its function within a globalized economy. Along the way, it skewers its lightning-rod targets with a precision too sharp to be considered entirely fictional.
That its author is not only well-versed in satire, having written four other novels in the genre, but is also a professor of English at the University of Toronto and an experienced college administrator, further blurs the lines between comic fiction and brutal fact. It’s the kind of no-holds-barred book only a consummate insider would know to write—but only one who is also conveniently outside the American university system could get away with writing.
“This is someone who’s got the inside dope on what can go on at universities, especially with international students, and what kind of con games are going on,” said Margaret Atwood, a friend and fellow Torontonian.
The novel, like Boyagoda himself, is often very funny—even as the dilemmas its characters face read as tragedy. Its cast includes the bickering members of a Sri Lankan hotel cleaner’s family, insecure American freshmen, dead-end third-tier college professors and their highflying Ivy League counterparts and dispirited university functionaries. An old-fashioned Dickensian tale, it sweeps across continents and campuses, from a classic liberal-arts college to a stand-in for Harvard University to an urban technical school to the dilapidated buildings of a state-run university in Sri Lanka.
“I’m a joyful person,” Boyagoda said in an interview, though he prefers to see his outlook on academia as “hopeful” rather than optimistic. He smiles and laughs frequently. He bikes everywhere. He derives energy from his students and from his four daughters, ages 14 to 20. They help him and his American wife, Anna, also an educator, care for Boyagoda’s father, an immigrant from Sri Lanka who has dementia and lives with the family.
The germ of the novel came to Boyagoda during the pandemic, when he was serving as a vice-dean. An urban legend was circulating about a statistics grad student selling passing grades to international students. The cheating scheme itself may well have been apocryphal, but it felt tantalizingly plausible.
“As a novelist, it stayed with me,” Boyagoda said. “Who would sell grades for a stats course? Why would someone buy grades? What’s motivating them? Why wouldn’t the university be doing something about it?” What he didn’t want to do, he explained, was write “another novel about a creative writing professor and his drama with students.”
In addition to writing novels—the first of which was a finalist for Canada’s prestigious Giller Prize; he’s written eight books in total—Boyagoda teaches literature full-time. For his students next semester, kids raised in a purportedly “post-literature era,” he’s assigning three 700-page novels, he noted mischievously, books by George Eliot, Ralph Ellison and Kiran Desai.
On RateMyProfessors, students remark on Boyagoda’s heavy assignments, tough grading and distaste for cellphones, but also hail his “comedy.” When alerted to these reviews, Boyagoda laughed. “Guilty as charged,” he said.
“Randy’s one of those people in academia who is very well educated but doesn’t have an ounce of superiority about him,” said John Irving, who frequently guest lectures in Boyagoda’s classroom. “It’s amazing to see how willing students are to talk in his classrooms, how little afraid they feel of being mocked or put down—he gets complete candor out of them.”
Negotiating competing interests seems to come naturally to him. Like many college campuses, after the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, the University of Toronto was embroiled in protests, encampments and discord; part of the school’s response was to convene a working group on civil discourse. Boyagoda was put in charge, serving for two years. It’s the kind of thankless task many professors would flee from, but Boyagoda relished the prospect and thinks the group, which is ongoing, made progress.
He has since pivoted to another formidable academic concern: the waning prestige of the humanities. In July, Boyagoda became the director of the Jackman Humanities Institute and special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science. This fall, he is starting a series of gatherings he calls the Dead Book Club. (Dead writers feature heavily among his favorites: St. Augustine, Dante, William Faulkner, Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow.)
“The goal is to encourage students to read for its own sake and have conversation for its own sake,” Boyagoda said. “The importance of the humanities will be revealed to those who participate.”
“Lords of Serendipity,” which publishes next week, reflects Boyagoda’s commitment to the pursuit of knowledge: “I’m supposed to say I learn more from my students than they do from me, but no,” Boyagoda said. “I enjoy sharing my excitement and joy about literature and ideas. There are these moments when you are teaching and you can see someone’s face change because they didn’t know something and then they did. That moment when you’re actually watch someone enlarge themselves is deeply satisfying.”
In literary circles, Boyagoda is often referred to as a Catholic novelist, a description he embraces. “A novelist willing to give shape and voice to contemporary religious experience is needed,” Boyagoda said. “I understand myself as a Catholic novelist, provided that I’m not only a Catholic novelist, I’m also a South Asian novelist and I’m a Canadian novelist. I don’t want to be captive to one label.”
His characters, he said, are subjected to what he calls “Graham Greene character situations.”
“They are trying to do good in a fallen world and realize the most they can do is less harm than someone else would do in that same role,” he explained. “They have to accept they are complicit in something that provides some good thing to others. It’s a very Graham Greene way of thinking about sacrifice.”
The campus green they inhabit is a febrile zone in which lofty ideals and cynicism regularly collide. It’s a place where a traditional holiday college celebration is now an occasion for political protest. Kids freely police one another inside and out of the classroom with social media their constant, ready weapon of choice. International students, knowing their family’s financial futures hinge on their degrees, operate in terror of failure and deportation.
Early readers of the book include Gary Shteyngart and Junot Diaz, both of whom have taught at universities and written comic novels. They each contacted Boyagoda midway through to say, in essence, “You nailed it.”
As biting as “Lords of Serendipity” can be, Boyagoda’s faith in higher education remains undaunted.
“It’s absurd that we live in societies that make the decision to take people between the ages of 18 and 22, when they are most physically capable of contributing to our nations and communities, and tell them, ‘Go away for four years, and read and learn and have conversations,’” he said. “I want students to be aware of what an incredible privilege that is.”
Corrections & Amplifications
Randy Boyagoda is a special advisor on the humanities to the dean of arts and science at the University of Toronto. An earlier version of this article incorrectly said he is a special adviser to the dean of humanities. (Corrected on Sept. 2)
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