Better hotel design through magazine reading

— -- Do you crave a unique lodging experience beyond the monotony of the usual bland, chain hotels? If so, hotel companies are trying harder than ever to accommodate you.

Research conducted by Marriott indicates one third of all travelers are "experience driven" and would therefore gravitate to a boutique or lifestyle hotel. But all boutique/lifestyle hotel rooms combined represent only 3% of available hotel rooms today. So there is a major gap that many hotel chains are beginning to exploit with new brands like Hyatt Place, Indigo and W Hotels. Marriott recently announced a new venture with boutique hotel pioneer Ian Schrager to launch a lifestyle/boutique brand called Edition, which will eventually include 100 properties across the globe.

But amid a growing crop of boutique hotels from chains large and small, one company is taking hotel design to a unique extreme. Chip Conley, the founder and chief executive officer of Joie de Vivre Hotels (JDV), a rapidly growing collection of 38 unique hotels based in California, thinks the answer lies with a famous psychologist and in the pages of popular magazines.

In managing JDV, which he began in 1987, Conley uses guiding precepts based on the teachings of psychologist Abraham Maslow. The result is a recipe that permeates every aspect of hotel management, beginning with the very conception of each new property. Every JDV hotel embodies a different theme based on one or two popular magazines such as Business Week, Esquire, or Fortune; or more specialized or niche publications like Dwell, Real Simple, or Vibe.

To establish a new hotel's personality a dozen or so JDV employees will assemble in a room, spread 40 or 50 magazines on the table, and start talking. Once they've selected their magazines they'll study the advertisers and the target demographic and psychographic for those publications. They then select five words describing the magazine audience. This becomes the theme for the new hotel.

Each word selected describes a unique service or attribute. "If the hotel is going to be 'rustic', what is going to be rustic about it? Or if it is going to be 'indulgent', what is going to be indulgent? We try to actually identify specifics," Conley told me.