Design of Welcome

That welcome is never one-size-fits-all. It may be quiet and restorative, shaped by privacy and retreat. It may be social and immersive, tied to the energy of local culture. Sometimes it feels like home. Sometimes it offers a deliberate sense of escape. In every case, the question is the same: how does a place make people feel received?

We think of hospitality less as a typology than as a discipline, one that shapes how people arrive at a place and the lasting impression it leaves. The programs differ across hotels, campuses, and residential and civic settings, but the ambition is consistent: to create places with atmosphere and a clear sense of their setting.

This work begins long before check-in, in three registers at once: spatial, material, and emotional. The spatial register provides cues about how to enter and where to go without friction. Light, texture, and proportion set the atmosphere; acoustics and views do quieter work. Together, these decisions establish the emotional tone of a place.

The Sitio offers one version of this approach. Conceived as a compact point of arrival within the new Atlantic Park district, anchored by the first Wavegarden Cove surf lagoon in North America, the twenty-room boutique hotel translates the surf, art, and music culture of its setting into an intimate hospitality experience. Rather than relying on abundance, the project creates distinctiveness through curation and a close relationship to the life around it.

A front desk carved from a tree reclaimed during the district's construction. Playlists developed with Pharrell Williams' team, introducing guests to new artists during each stay. An art program that showcases work by local makers alongside internationally recognized names. Every choice inside a deliberately small hotel belongs to a specific coast, a specific town, a specific creative community.

The Virginia Guesthouse at the University of Virginia, designed in collaboration with TenBerke, offers another reading, one in which hospitality is less about retreat from context than about connection within it. Sited at the hinge between Central and North Grounds, the 214-room hotel anchors the Emmet-Ivy Corridor and serves as both threshold and commons, pulling together a hotel, conference center, visitor hub, and social condenser in a single building.

It was designed to receive a broad range of visitors, from prospective students and alumni to faculty, conference guests, and the Charlottesville community, all entering through the same door. The Guesthouse forms a first touchpoint that is accessible and unmistakably On Grounds.

The hospitality thinking is legible in the naming. The central common space is called the Living Room rather than the lobby. The restaurant, Poplar, takes its name from a tree planted at Jefferson's Monticello. The chandelier at the center of the building is shaped after the Pratt Ginkgo, the most famous tree on UVA's Grounds. Three dining venues animate the building from morning to night, from a ground-floor café to a rooftop terrace with views of the University and the Blue Ridge beyond.

Once hospitality is understood this way, its different expressions become easier to read, not as separate themes competing for attention, but as variations on a shared underlying idea. The risk, of course, is that the discipline produces its own kind of sameness: the airport-lounge-ification of every lobby, the "campus living room" that looks identical at twelve different research parks. The corrective is the same one that distinguishes good hospitality design from generic hospitality design. It is specificity. Welcome that cannot be transplanted.

The Historic Cavalier Hotel in this sense, demonstrates welcome encoded in inherited spatial sequences. A 1927 Jeffersonian-inspired Classical Revival landmark on the Virginia Beach oceanfront, the Cavalier returned to its original stature after a four-year restoration. Its appeal lies partly in preservation, but more specifically in the continuity that preservation makes possible. 

The Y-shaped plan that still gives nearly every room a view of the Atlantic, the original cementitious terrazzo floors with brass dividers kept in place, the first-floor windows removed and repaired by hand. Restoration here is the means by which an earlier generation's idea of welcome (civic, ceremonial, theatrical) remains legible to a contemporary guest. The resulting experience is an entry into a particular moment in time, a heightened sense of remove from the ordinary.

This view becomes especially useful beyond the hotel typology itself. Some of the most relevant lessons for hospitality design come from projects that are not hotels at all.

Tulane University's Fogelman Hall is one of them. The first building completed in Phase II of Tulane's Residential Village, Fogelman sits at the center of the uptown campus.

The question on a project like this is not how to replicate a hotel, but how to shape a residential setting that feels welcoming and deeply connected to campus life. Residence halls are often discussed in terms of efficiency and student support, both of which matter. But they are also environments of long-duration welcome, places students return to every day, for years, at a scale hotels do not have to consider.

The hall is home to more than three hundred residents, with a Tulane professor in residence embedded in the community as a daily presence. The ground floor is a network of spaces for study, socializing, and recreation, designed to complement the larger community hub established in Phase I.

Double-height lounges give each building a gathering room students can treat as their own, flexible enough for focused study or informal exchange. Locally sourced St. Joe's Brick ties the hall into Tulane's architectural fabric so that arriving residents feel the continuity of the place they are joining.

The sPARK Axis Amenities Center makes a related argument at a different scale. Sited at the edge of a 102-acre science and research campus in North Carolina, the building is designed as the campus living room, meant to receive staff, researchers, visitors, and neighbors from the surrounding community. The hospitality thinking is in how the building anticipates the way people actually dwell.

A sweeping roofline extends past the walls so welcome begins before the door. Inside, warm woods and stone register more as living room than lobby. Seating is distributed so people can choose where to settle: a quiet nook for focused work, a lounge for conversation, a booth in the active corner of the building. Amenities from a café to a game area sit within easy reach, inviting people to linger. On a research campus, where buildings often prioritize throughput and productivity, this is a deliberate claim for wellbeing.

The value of this approach is that it resists narrow categorization. A hotel, a conference center, a residence hall, and an amenities center each ask different things of architecture, but all benefit from close attention to how welcome is constructed and how identity is translated into experience. 

At the center of our practice is welcome, a precise architectural task. How someone arrives. What tells them they belong here. What atmosphere helps them settle, connect, or pause. These are not questions hospitality clients alone are asking. They are increasingly the questions universities, developers, and civic institutions bring to us. Our work is to answer them in forms that are specific, durable, and rooted in place.