‘Innovators' profiles the people driving the future of travel—those who lead rather than follow, who break things, take risks, and solve problems in fresh ways.
Walk inside one of Kit Kemp’s hotels and you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d stepped through the looking glass. Responsible for beloved properties like London’s Ham Yard Hotel and the Crosby Street Hotel in New York, the co-owner and creative director of Firmdale Hotels has a knack for transforming seemingly ordinary-looking spaces into extraordinary pockets of personality—a perfect mishmash of color, artwork, textiles, and patterned wallpaper. “I’ve always been much more frightened of beige or taupe than color itself,” says Kemp. We sat down with the designer and hotelier to find out what she thinks hotels get wrong, how she juggles creative vision with sustainability, and why we all need a bit of color in our lives.
Your properties remain so colorful and dynamic while so many other hotels are leaning far more minimalist. Why do you think guests still crave that richness in interiors?
I think color does make you happy—it's as simple as that. I don't understand why hotels are all looking so serious. The interior should have a point of view; hotels should have a point of view. They should possess a sense of adventure and capture your imagination. I think one of the beauties of traveling these days is that you can be as eccentric as you want to be. If you're a technophobe, there should be a hotel for you. If you're a fashionista, there should be a hotel for you. I do think that it’s the more monotone hotels that are easily forgotten.
How do you start shaping the personality of a hotel space?
You don’t want to have too many designers. When that happens you lose the congruence and harmony of the place. You have to have one single thread that runs through a building. I will usually have a favorite artist or craftsperson that I've found, and I’ll try and commission work from them. When we did the Charlotte Street Hotel in Bloomsbury, London, it was obvious from the beginning that we were going to look back to the Bloomsbury period of Virginia Woolf and the [design collective] Omega Workshops with Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant because it was such a rich period in history to draw upon. I always loved their idea of an art salon, and I've always looked upon our hotels as places where you can sit and talk about different artists or authors.
Hotels are often more focused on creating co-working spaces rather than salons. Do you think we’re forgetting to focus on the fun and the joy of travel?
Whenever I interview people for jobs, the main thing they say they want to do is work in a team. The way that we work right now can make us feel isolated, so finding a sense of community is really important. These [co-working] spaces are a clever idea, but they suddenly all look the same. When that happens you lose all the fantasy; all the sense of arrival that you should get when you walk into somewhere new in an unknown place.
Is it that sense of fantasy that made you fall in love with hotels in the first place?
I'm never going to be able to visit all the jungles in Africa, and I'm never going to be able to sleep in all of the world’s fabulous houses, but wherever I travel, I want to feel that I've arrived somewhere different. And that gets harder and harder as more brands become global. With a hotel, you get to bring a story of what you found there, or the things that are exciting you there, to your guests. You create your own little world, planet, or kingdom.
There is increasing pressure for hotels to become more sustainable. How do you juggle that with your design vision?
We’re thinking about sustainability all the time—right down to the perfumes and soap. Currently, we’re working on a solid shampoo because it’s meant to be much better [for the environment] than a liquid one, and all our liquids are in bamboo pumps which biodegrade over 10 years rather than 200. Our slippers are biodegradable and our laundry bags are made out of recycled plastic bottles. The challenge is that you still need to be sustainable without it tainting the beauty of design; you want to have a light that still shines beautifully and isn't too sharp, for example. Much more still has to be done to achieve that I think. But certainly, when we build, we build to a gold standard. We got the LEED Gold Award at the Crosby Street in New York for sustainability—the first one in New York, actually.
Beyond progress in sustainability, what else do you hope will be different about hotels in, say, 10 or 15 years?
People are becoming more and more knowledgeable, and it means that as hoteliers you have got to look up to your client rather than down on them. I think lots of hotels have always looked down on their clients. I’m noticing a big turnaround in regards to that right now. So, hopefully, we will be less arrogant.
Do you feel a pressure to be more than one thing?
Yes, because things are changing all the time. But I'm not going to stand still—that's all part of the excitement of travel.
