Starwood Hotels & Resorts Fuels Innovation with Starlab, a New Brand Innovation Studio

The manifestation of a brand can take on many forms, and a company’s workplace often acts as a reflection of its brand. Many companies struggle to present a united, tailored presence in their workplaces, often for the understandable reason of limited resources. But many brands thrive on exploring and crafting their identity in ways that will help their businesses profit.

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Lobby, Photography: courtesy of Starwood Hotels & Resorts

At the top of that list of brands is Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, which earlier this year unveiled Starlab, the company’s new brand innovation studio located in Manhattan’s Garment District. Design-led with the spirit and agility of a start-up, Starlab brings together a cross-section of the company’s digital, design and luxury brand teams in one urban office for the first time. The 46,000 square foot, bi-level office is an evolution of Starwood’s approach to new style workspaces, following the debuts of the Starwood Experience at the company’s global headquarters in Stamford, CT, as well as its former Tribeca-based design center.

Designed by Starwood’s in-house creative team with VM Architecture Studio PC, Starlab is pursuing LEED certification, reinforcing the company’s commitment to reducing energy use by 20%, water use by 30%, and carbon emissions by 30% by 2020.

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Digital Chandelier

Accommodating 150 people with flex room for up to 205, The new space is a constant working laboratory that aims not only to reinvent the future of travel, but the future of the modern day workspace. The bi-level office will help serve as a hub for testing new innovations for all of Starwood’s nine brands. Starlab serves as a creative hub to immerse associates, owners, developers, customers and partners in the company’s latest two- and three-dimensional design work, guest technology and brand programming.

“Starwood employs a cross-discipline design team to create its luxury brands, oriented around the processes – so interior designers, graphic designers, environmental designers, digital designers, brand marketing teams, and more are all working alongside one another,” said Mike Tiedy, senior VP of brand design and innovation at Starwood Hotels.

“In design, more and more of the work has a social aspect. And in our hotels, we’re finding that people are coming down to the public spaces in a social or semi-social manner – together, but alone. That’s something we wanted to capture in our own creative space.”

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Workspace with digital feed frames to the left.

Inspired by the rise of social connectivity reshaping global business, the design team at Starwood brought digital and social content to the forefront of Starlab’s design. At the office entrance, a smart mirror doubles as a digital display showcasing Starwood’s latest video news, photography and user-generated content. Serving as the office centerpiece, a digital chandelier cascades down the internal staircase – part art installation, part news ticker – bringing real time hotel guest comments into the office environment via a revolving Twitter feed. Five digital feed frames rotate guests’ Instagram posts in a gallery-style space adjacent to the communal dining area.

“The digital side of our luxury brand strategy is now coming more to the forefront,” said Mr. Tiedy. “When attacking the challenge of digital fluency, we wanted to ensure we had a holistic plan for creating a solution. The digital chandelier and Instagram feed frames are a manifestation of that focus.”

 

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Le Meridien meeting room

Starlab was designed to promote cross-functional collisions and foster creativity, and is filled with inspiring, flexible options in which employees can choose to work.

“Many of the guest trends we’re seeing in our hotels became relevant as we started to design Starlab,” said Mr. Tiedy, in the project notes. “People seek out inspiring spaces to conduct casual meetings, flexible seating to scroll through a tablet presentation or individual work areas that offer some privacy – our associates are no different.”

A tech lab enables associates to experiment and test the company’s latest digital innovations, such as the recent introductions of its SPG Keyless, a keyless room key solution allowing travelers to opt out of traditional check-in for a truly mobile guest experience. A library provides a semi-private space for informal meetings with bleacher-style seating and flexible tables, design boards and projectors; and dining areas, including an outdoor terrace, feature communal tables with flexible seating options.

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Library

Individual workstations allow associates to choose between sitting, standing, and balancing on a stability ball, while modular seating areas with banquettes and objects d’art bring smaller groups together to ideate.

“We have a lot of floaters – people who are working on specific projects with us – and so we tried to build the space to accommodate those people with a lot of touchdown spots,” said Mr. Tiedy. “And many of the semi-private spaces, which give just a touch of privacy, are surprisingly being used a lot.”

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HuddleSpace

Perhaps the most ingenious feature of Starlab is the design team’s approach to conferencing, which reinvents traditional staid conference rooms with designer “suites,” representing the Luxury Collection, St. Regis, W and Le Méridien brands. Each suite is a totally unique, all-encompassing experience embodying the spirit of one hotel brand. The spaces are highly stylized and accessorized, and one can’t help but be submerged in Starwood brand culture.

The W Suite, for example, channels the brand’s cocktail culture, replacing the conference table with a bar inset with LED lighting that highlights a beverage display, bar stools flanked by smoked bronze mirrors and a revolving “art wall” dedicated to storytelling from W hotels and resorts around the world.

 

Starlab is an exceptional project for its diverse, cross-discipline flexibility and its complete commitment to brand identity exploration. Starwood now has a superb environment in which to introduce customers and design and business partners of all kinds to its hospitality experience.