Design Hotels

Design Hotels brought 450 senior creatives from the international hospitality and design world together for a four-day gathering. I was commissioned to design and produce the immersive welcome experience for the evening event; the moment guests moved from a full day of conferences into dinner, followed by an after-party.

My initial role expanded swiftly once the project had begun. In addition to crafting the welcome experience, I was seconded to Arena's lead production team to oversee the entire Wilhelm Hallen event: welcome experience, dinner, dance intervention and after-party. Client vendors, production logistics and budget management were now key additional responsibilities.

My first move was structural, and the mechanism was the footprint. The chosen venue was enormous with zero built-in infrastructure, so lighting and sound scale directly with the square meterage you commit to. Shrinking that footprint cascaded through everything: fewer lights, less cabling, shorter builds, shared trucks with other suppliers. I protected the budget for the three things directly affecting guest experience: food, sound, light. Streamlining the rest lowered the production bottom line by 25%: staff down 30%, equipment 22%, transport 25%, a margin that created a buffer against inflated costs elsewhere. 

One unexpected problem arose on day two of the installation phase, 24 hours before the event launched, when I became aware of a power accessibility issue. Vendors for the after-show, while installing their equipment, notified me that their own power supply was not compatible with the venue's specifications. During the initial pre-production venue inspection, only the main caterers had been positioned and granted access to the venue's main power supply; all other vendors had limited access elsewhere, requiring extensive cabling, something that had not been communicated to them. I now had less than 24 hours to source the necessary power supplies and recalculate the positioning of the after-party vendors without disrupting the guest experience. Once the additional supplies arrived, the new production plot was implemented and the event went ahead on time without a technical fault.

Budget and technical constraints shaped the final form significantly, but the philosophical architecture held through delivery. What resulted was a single-evening experience for 450 people from exactly the industry this work speaks to, delivered at scale inside a large industrial venue and a working relationship with Design Hotels that outlasted the brief itself.