Five Hospitality Projects That Changed How We Work
Lessons from contract design
Studio work and contract work require different muscles.
In the studio, you make what shouldn’t exist until it does. In contract design—hotels, restaurants, lobbies, corporate spaces—you make what must exist, on time, on budget, at scale, for people who will use it without knowing your name.
We’ve done both for twenty years. The studio pieces—Diamond Sofa, Soft Pipe, the wine cellars—are what people know us for. But the hospitality projects taught us things the studio never could. They forced us to design differently, think differently, fail differently.
Here are five projects that changed how we work.
Project One: The Boutique Hotel That Wanted Icons
The brief: A 24-room boutique hotel in Northern Italy. The owner had seen our furniture at a design fair. She wanted “iconic pieces” in every public space. Lobby, bar, restaurant, lounge. Objects that would photograph well, that guests would remember, that would define the hotel’s identity.
What we proposed: Custom sculptural seating for the lobby. A statement bar installation. Lighting pieces that would work as functional art.
What we learned: Icons are expensive. Icons take time. Icons don’t always sit well with the operational realities of a hotel that needs to seat 40 people for breakfast, accommodate luggage trolleys, and withstand the wear of 8,000 guest-nights per year.
The owner loved the designs. The hotel manager looked at them and asked how quickly the lobby pieces could be cleaned, how much the bar installation would cost to maintain, whether the lighting could be dimmed for evening service.
We redesigned everything.
Not because the original concept was wrong—it would have been stunning. But because an icon that creates operational friction isn’t iconic. It’s a problem the staff works around every day until management replaces it with something simpler.
The lesson: In hospitality design, beauty that creates work for staff is bad design. Full stop. The most successful piece we created for that project was a modular seating system that looked sculptural but could be reconfigured in five minutes for different events. It photographed beautifully. It worked beautifully. And the housekeeping team didn’t hate us.
Project Two: The Restaurant Where Everything Had to Be Replaceable
The brief: A high-volume restaurant in Milan. 120 covers per service, twice daily. The design needed to feel unique, elevated, memorable—but everything had to be off-the-shelf or easily reproducible.
What we resisted: The entire premise. We make unique pieces. Limited editions. Objects that take weeks to produce. The idea of designing a space where nothing was singular felt like designing in handcuffs.
What we learned: Constraints force better ideas.
We couldn’t use one-off sculptural furniture, so we focused on spatial composition instead. The room’s identity came from how elements were arranged, not from the uniqueness of individual pieces. We specified chairs and tables that could be ordered from catalogs—but we designed custom banquette seating built into architectural niches, lighting that created zones within the space, material choices (brass, dark walnut, textured plaster) that gave the room weight and presence.
When a chair broke—and in high-volume restaurants, chairs break—it was replaced in 48 hours. When the owner wanted to reconfigure the layout for a private event, it happened without calling us. The restaurant still felt distinctly designed, but it wasn’t dependent on unreplaceable objects.
The lesson: A space’s character doesn’t come from rare objects. It comes from how common objects are composed. Good hospitality design makes the ordinary feel intentional. This was the first project where we understood that spatial design and object design are different practices, and conflating them makes you worse at both.
Project Three: The Lobby That Taught Us About Corners
The brief: A hotel lobby in a converted historic building. Beautiful architecture, terrible proportions. Long, narrow space with a reception desk at one end and a lounge area at the other. The owner wanted the lounge to feel intimate despite being visible from the entrance.
What we proposed: A large sculptural screen to divide the space. Custom millwork to create visual zones. Lighting to define separate areas within the long room.
What happened: The screen worked. The lighting worked. But the lounge still felt exposed. Guests didn’t linger. They checked in, noticed the beautiful space, and went directly to their rooms. The lounge was empty most days.
We stood in the space for two hours one afternoon trying to understand why. And then we saw it: there were no corners. The entire lounge was open, visible, centered. Humans don’t relax in the center of rooms. We relax in corners, against walls, in spaces where our backs are protected and our sightlines are clear.
We added two things: a deep built-in banquette along one wall (backs protected), and a small side table zone tucked into an alcove we’d originally dismissed as too small to use (corner secured). Within a week, those became the only spots anyone wanted to sit.
The lesson: Hospitality design is applied psychology as much as it is aesthetics. People don’t just want beautiful spaces—they want spaces that feel safe, that accommodate how humans actually move and settle and occupy rooms. Every project since then, we map corners first. Where can someone sit with their back protected? Where can two people have a conversation without being overheard? Where does natural light reach without creating glare? Get those right, and the aesthetic choices have something solid to build on.
Project Four: The Hotel Chain That Wanted a “Design Language”
The brief: A small luxury hotel group planning to open three properties over five years. They wanted a cohesive “design language”—recognizable elements that would appear in all locations, creating brand continuity without making the hotels feel identical.
What we proposed: A toolkit of custom elements that could be adapted to different contexts. Specific furniture pieces, a consistent material palette (brass, dark stained oak, hand-troweled plaster), signature lighting designs, a set of proportional relationships that would govern spatial decisions across properties.
What we created: A 40-page design manual. Specifications for everything. Furniture drawings with dimensions and finishes. Material samples. Guidelines for how much variation was permissible. We built an entire system.
What failed: The second property.
A different architect was involved. A different contractor. A different regional aesthetic. The manual was used as a reference, but the brass became bronze (“easier to source locally”), the oak became walnut (“better availability”), the lighting designs were “adapted” until they were unrecognizable. The third property deviated even further.
The hotel group loved all three properties. But they didn’t have a design language. They had three nice hotels.
The lesson: Systems only work if someone enforces them. In hospitality design, unless you’re designing, specifying, and supervising every property directly, your “design language” will drift. This isn’t a failure of the system—it’s a reality of how projects actually get built. Contractors improvise. Architects substitute. Owners make last-minute changes. If brand consistency is truly the goal, you need on-site oversight and contractual control. If you don’t have that, design for variation instead. Create elements that are strong enough to be recognizable even when imperfectly executed. We learned this too late on that project, but it shaped how we approached multi-location work afterward.
Project Five: The Wine Bar That Made Us Rethink “Bespoke”
The brief: A wine bar in a historic building in Rome. Small space, significant architecture, clientele that expected refinement. The owner wanted everything custom—furniture, lighting, bar, shelving, glassware display. Nothing off-the-shelf. “This needs to feel like nowhere else.”
What we designed: Everything. Every object in that space was drawn, detailed, fabricated specifically for that project. Custom bar top in Carrara marble. Custom stools in blackened steel and leather. Custom wine racks in solid walnut with brass detailing. Custom pendant lights in hand-blown glass.
The timeline: Eight months from concept to opening. Three months longer than planned.
The budget: 40% over initial estimate. Not because we were reckless—because custom everything means custom problems. The marble supplier’s first slab had a vein running through the wrong location. The steel fabricator misread a dimension on the stools and had to remake them. The glassblower’s first attempt at the pendants was beautiful but the wrong scale. Every single element required iteration, correction, coordination.
What the owner said at opening: “It’s perfect. But I’m never doing this again.”
What we learned: Bespoke is a trap unless the client understands what they’re buying. They’re not buying objects—they’re buying time, craft, problem-solving, and the acceptance of uncertainty. When we design a custom piece for a private collector, that’s the expectation. When we design custom everything for a hospitality project that needs to open on a fixed date, that expectation collides with operational reality.
The wine bar was one of the most beautiful spaces we’ve ever created. It also taught us to design in layers: identify the 2-3 elements that must be custom to establish the space’s identity, and let everything else be specified from high-quality catalogs. Custom where it matters. Standard where it works.
The real lesson: The client was right. Every subsequent project, we’ve designed for 70/30: 70% specified, 30% custom. The custom work gets better because we’re not spreading craft across every element. The timelines hold because most suppliers deliver on schedule. The budgets work because we’re not absorbing risk on fifteen different fabricators.
And the spaces still feel singular. Because the 30% we choose to make bespoke are the elements that define the room.
What contract work taught the studio
These five projects changed how we approach everything—not just hospitality design, but studio work too.
We design for maintenance now. Even sculptural pieces. Even limited editions. If something can’t be cleaned, repaired, or refinished without specialized knowledge, we rethink the material or the detail.
We map human behavior before we draw forms. Where will people stand? Where will they sit? What do they need to see, touch, reach? The form follows, not the other way around.
We design systems, not just objects. How does this piece relate to the architecture? To the lighting? To the operational needs of the people who work in the space? Isolated objects—no matter how beautiful—are weaker than considered systems.
We embrace the 70/30 rule. Not everything needs to be heroic. In fact, heroic works better when it’s surrounded by the well-considered ordinary.
And most importantly: we learned that constraints make the work stronger. The studio pieces get all the attention. But the contract projects—the ones with budgets, timelines, operational requirements, and clients who need the space to actually work—forced us to become better designers.
Sculpture that sits down is interesting.
Sculpture that sits down, survives daily use, stays within budget, and makes the housekeeping staff’s job easier?
That’s design.
Sand & Birch Studio provides hospitality design, bespoke furniture, and contract services for hotels, restaurants, and luxury residential projects. For inquiries about design consultation or training programmes for hospitality teams, visit sandandbirch.com/contact or explore Sand & Birch Academy.
