We’re thrilled to be working on the renovation of a classic art deco hotel in South Beach with our friends at FOUND Hotels. It’s a hospitality designer’s dream project, an amazing location with all the deco details complete with original terrazzo floors and a swimming pool.
We recently completed the schematic design phase, which gave us a chance to revisit our own design process and how we go about exploring and expressing the key design ideas of the space. Often the presentation of this phase might consist of a combination of inspiration imagery, cad drawings, and computer-generated renderings.
With any design project, we always start with hand drawings, often literal napkin sketches over coffee or cocktails (depending on when inspiration strikes). Rarely though, do these preliminary doodles ever see the light of day from the client’s perspective.
With this project, we decided to take a non-digital approach and capture our ideas in hand-drawn vignettes brought to life with loosely-applied watercolor accents. By no means are we professional illustrators, but the end result was a hit with the client and succeeded at sharing our concept in a way that guided the conversation toward “big picture” design intent rather than allowing us to get caught up in the details one can’t avoid representing in a realistic rendering.
