How the Global Business Class Has Transformed the Home

Ever-more-sleek office centers, plusher gym facilities and spas, themed recreation spaces, personalized grooming and massage services, more varied food and drink offerings, automated environmental controls, and, of course, room and concierge services have been combined to offer the business class a friction-free experience.

The objective is to better support increased productivity through ease of comfort. Once reserved for the elite hospitality establishments that served an exclusive class, these features have now trickled down to numerous hotel brands that compete on price while distinguishing themselves through a particular lifestyle image. Memberships to hotel chains and conglomerates are intended to increase repeat use by ensuring a consistent level of service to this pervasive mobile class. Inevitably, the increased time that the business class spends at these establishments influences their aesthetic tastes and lifestyle expectations, most notably when it comes to the home.

Once a refuge from work, the domicile has now become suffused with the mindset, characteristics, and decor of the contemporary hospitality environment. Indications of luxury, the hallmark aspiration of the hospitality industry, now abound in even the humblest of dwellings. Overscaled mirrors, boudoirs, curtains, lighting, and furniture that might be overlooked for their awkwardness in small rooms with temporary inhabitants now adorn similarly scaled domestic spaces. Many home bathrooms now display accessories and artisanal grooming products with matching containers and baskets to organize it all, evincing a curated ambience that exudes hospitality’s influence. Individual choices for home furnishings are now overrun by ensembles of categorized styles for easy identification and implementation, diminishing the unpredictable eccentricities of personal taste. This aesthetic cycle churns on as hotels continue to use “affect” to distinguish themselves from their competitors; the plethora of choices in wall coverings, stone, tiles, carpets, fixtures, hardware, and other surface treatments and accessories they use are now deployed by many in their domestic environments—and often with exaggeration rather than discipline.

This is evident when comparing photographs of the interiors of many residences for sale today with those of hotel lobbies, rooms, and amenity spaces. For example, the amount of throw pillows shown on beds and sofas in both environments are remarkably similar, as are the staged bathroom settings. These preoccupations continue to be a prime factor driving the growth of the home decor industry. It extends even to building technologies, where computer-managed lighting features and temperature-control systems intended to save energy across dozens of rooms across multiple floors in a hotel are now used to do the same in a modestly sized single-family house. The power savings due to economies of scale in a hotel are real, whereas in a house, the energy to run such systems is likely similar to the energy saved. But such human-free features signal status, which translates to resale value, and they are more convenient than manually flipping a switch or using commonsense energy-saving behavior, like putting on a sweater. (The significant growth in the amount of energy needed to run AI platforms will only exacerbate this issue.) And the value of condominiums and townhomes are now increasingly dependent on the amenities and level of concierge services provided, earning their reputations the way hotels earn their stars. For people on the move, quality of convenience can easily trump quality of space. “Lock and leave” has become a well-worn phrase in the real-estate lexicon to attract such homeowners.

Perhaps this is more an indication that one’s domicile has become less a home and more a financial asset—and, as such, it must at least look like it’s keeping up with the times, employing the latest trends to be marketplace relevant. And those domestic trends are being set by the hospitality environment because of the business class who live there. Spending much of one’s time in hotels can condition one to think differently about one’s home. If one is constantly changing rooms when traveling, it’s easy to see how one could also begin regarding a home in this temporal fashion. This budding mindset, combined with the business attitude to maximize the monetization of assets, has led to homes being deployed in the short-term stay industry, once a lesser-known alternative but now a firmly established form of hospitality.

But the home is not the only place where the hospitality industry has left its imprint. The workplace has been affected as well. This should not be surprising, since the business class spends most of their time there when not on the road. In the 30-plus years I have been an architect, the workplace for the business class seems to have remained essentially unchanged except for people migrating out of private offices and having less space to work from. Given the rising costs of urban real estate, the space savings of moving people into smaller cubicles or open office workbenches are obvious. But something more significant changed, as all this reduced office space did not translate into smaller leases because employers recognzed the increased content creation value of in-person exchanges. Thus, much of this saved space was transformed into amenities: more conference rooms, social spaces, ideation spaces, recreation spaces, focus spaces, and nap spaces, and the replacement of vending machines with curated food bars have all become features of the contemporary workspace, especially in the creative and tech fields. Talk of erasing the line between work and play or the “domestication of the workplace” were common terms in my industry up until the pandemic. Domesticity was the Trojan horse that hospitality used to invade the workplace. It is not a coincidence that many who find the social aspects of work distracting or do not have extroverted personalities and/or think they are being devalued by leaving that impression have continued to prefer working from home after the pandemic.

When Covid started, a client asked me how I thought the pandemic would change the workplace. At the time, the thought was there would be a need for increased hygiene levels. I advised him that the future of the workplace did not lie in the workplace, but in the home. The influence of hospitality in one’s home will now be accompanied by the influence of the workplace, if not more so in lifestyle, certainly in function, as working from home has become more commonplace. And as it becomes fully normalized, we might even see a push by the business class to expense their employers for some of their domestic space and/or see the government expand the rights of full-time employees to treat that same domestic space as a tax deduction—the argument being that the business class should also financially benefit if working from home allows companies to shrink their leasable workplace footprint and pocket the savings. In 2024, surveying the current level of empty commercial office space, the question is not how the workplace will change, but how it will survive.

But that might also be a question soon posed to hospitality. With technology allowing us to reach almost anyone, almost anywhere without having to move, business travel may become less essential. With ever-tighter profit margins and rising operational costs, companies may not only shrink their office space but their use of business travel as well, and with that potentially shrink the hospitality industry. It is ironic that the smartphone as the harbinger of mobile work may now have reduced our need to be mobile for work. Thus the domestic environment, having absorbed the tastes of hospitality and the function of the workplace, may well become the new center for the business class. This will put design pressure on domiciles to do more, to be more. Most futures are compromises, but the line between home, work, and mobility may soon be less measured in miles traveled and more in diminishing inches and decibels reduced, as the future of domesticity increasingly plays host to even more digital interlopers. After decades of being on the road, the business class may finally be coming home.

And if that occurs, it’s worth speculating what effects that might have on our cities. Given the present high vacancy rate of commercial office space, there has been a move to convert these buildings to residential. Such work produces a lower carbon footprint, making the environmental advantages obvious. Many prewar office buildings with narrower floor plates have already undergone this evolution through adaptive reuse, but it has proved difficult for office buildings from the last three decades, which usually have much deeper floor plate spans of 40 feet or more. In addition to the costs associated with the infrastructure upgrades necessary to convert such buildings to residential, these deep floor plates pose a further challenge, as code-required natural light has difficulty reaching that far inside. One strategy has been to cut air shafts into these deep plates, allowing for more exposure to sunlight.

But then with the growing domestic need for office space, that cost might be avoided because business class work is predominantly on computers, which don’t require natural light in the same manner as a bedroom; in some industries, the glare that can result is detrimental to such work. Thus dedicated home offices can take up the spatial slack presented by these deeper spans. This approach has been crucial to the conversion of former industrial spaces into lofts, where inboard sleeping spaces are left open to gain access to sunlight. Such spaces could now serve as home offices in these reconfigured buildings, while sleeping quarters are moved to the advantageous position on the exterior face. At the macro level, based on need, maybe only a portion of such buildings are converted to residential allowing commercial office space to remain, clinging to its origins as it takes on domestic offspring.

Again, most futures take a mediated trajectory, but such buildings could serve as the framework for the next iteration of mixed-use living—or, in some instances, of a “company town,” a compressed vertical campus of distinct but integrated live-work spaces where one’s occasional commute between the two is now interiorized via the elevator. With these two anchor programs may come even more supporting businesses, internalized for ease of access as they have been in grand hotels for generations. This interior reuse strategy could be what allows cities to further break away from their traditional zoning culture of segregation by allowing fresh programs to infiltrate previously commercial-centric areas of the city. This is the flexibility provided by the office building’s typical plan, characterized by its repetitive structural grid. As Rem Koolhaas states in S,M,L,XL, the typical plan “is zero-degree architecture, architecture stripped of all traces of uniqueness and specificity.” It may now be time to further exploit such plans by injecting them with more programmatic specificity, both in type and number.

This evolved interior condition may then alter the future of city street life. The refuge that was once solely provided by our domiciles may now be shared more with streets. The multitude of services and varying forms of mobility that activate them serendipitously across the hours may now be calmed by increased landscape to be more the places of sought out respite from one’s interiors, especially after what we learned from the pandemic. Will Covid’s aftermath and these “dark ages” of business class work lend leverage to the demand that our streets now become parks, or at least parkways? Could the increased theming on comfort that hospitality has brought to our interiors now liberate our urban exteriors for the pastoral? New plans for the redesign of Fifth Avenue in New York or Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles, among others, indicate that this urban initiative may have already begun. In such scenarios, nature permeates city life, enabling our public realm to be more humane, more hospitable.

By Li Wen