Spatial planning for hotel design

Any hotel should use its space well. Those that do not risk paying a cost penalty, both during construction and later, when the hotel runs less efficiently than it could have. The secret is to plan the inter-relationships between the various functions within the hotel and ensure that the correct space allocation has been made for specific areas.

Spatial Relationships Figure 1 illustrates the preferred relationships for a hypothetical development. (Figure 1 omitted)

One of the prime requisites of hotel planning is to maintain a separation of public and service circulation routes. The former must flow from the entrance lobby to reception to bedrooms (vertical or horizontal flow depending on building). Within the public front of house, areas such as the restaurant, bar and lounge must also be easily accessible from the reception foyer. Also, if conference and leisure facilities are included within the development, these must be accessible from the hotel foyer. For developments with extensive banqueting facilities it is often worth providing a separate entrance foyer. This avoids congestion in the main hotel lobby when major events attracting non-resident guests are being held.

Back-of-house circulations should avoid intrusion into public areas. Staff should be provided with their own entrance into the building with access to changing rooms and from there to work areas, i.e. kitchen, stores, bedrooms, reception, administration offices and maintenance areas. Kitchen facilities in particular must be correctly located to provide efficient service to all food service areas including restaurants, conference rooms, bedrooms (if room service is provided) and staff restaurant. Ideally, distances between food preparation and service areas should be as short as possible and should negate the need for remote or secondary kitchen/preparatory areas. Failure to accomplish the latter objective will incur cost penalties both in development costs and in staff operating overheads.

Similarly, goods delivered to the hotel should be designed to flow through the building from the goods reception area to the main points of storage, or use, without resort to holding areas and without cross-overs of public circulation. The same principle holds for the removal of refuse from the operating areas to the main refuse collection area.

Vertical circulation of guests and services is an extremely important aspect of hotel design. The selection of the correct...