The Hotel Lobby - A place to find inspiration for events
The hotel lobby has recently become a favorite among young professionals looking for a substitute for the office/work-from-home situation. They have found an escape in the comfort of hotel lobbies. It’s usually a win-win situation—lobbies are a great place to work or meet, while at the same time, the hotel’s coffee shop generates revenue from food and drinks.
As an event furniture rental company, we love spending a day or two out of the office, working from a beautiful hotel lobby. Whether it's a sunny day in Miami or Austin or a cool breezy afternoon in New York, there is always a well-designed lobby to get work done.
But for us, the real reason for working from hotels is to get inspired and see how these hotels design their lobbies and create an inviting layout with furniture. In a way, the experience in a lobby resembles an event—people gather in a space to mingle and network while food is served and music plays in the background.
So, the more pleasing the lobby design, the better. An inviting lobby has a great layout, a beautiful combination of colors and patterns, good music, and always a cool coffee shop or bakery attached to it.
Let's take a look at a few hotels with great design and inspiring layouts:
The Edition Hotel Miami Beach
Photo: Edition Hotel website
Since this hotel opened in 2014, it has been our favorite workplace when we are away from the office. A restoration of the Seville hotel that existed circa 1955, it has a mix of Art Deco history with a touch of modern glamour. The lobby area itself - Wow! The lounge is a mix of white furniture upholstered in a soft canvas, light wood, a mix of beautiful tropical plants, and elements of marble. The background music is of soft tropical Cuban rhythms, and the scent in the air is amazing. What we love about the Edition Hotel lobby lounge is the inviting feeling you get when you enter. The softness of the furniture and the warmth of the tropical plants are "calling you". The furniture consists of longer continuous sofas with round marble tables and single armchairs on the other side of the tables. This setup allows for intimate conversations, but there is enough space on the floor to have larger groups congregate. At the end of the lounge, there is an impressive gold bar and back bar, where the hotel serves coffee during the day and drinks at night. A furniture lounge set in front of a bar is an excellent layout because it makes a seamless connection between the two. It's a great layout for corporate events.
The Carpenter Hotel Austin
Austin is a city synonymous with the words cool, vibe, and vintage. So, it's no surprise that whenever we're here, we enjoy working from one of the lowkey, cool hotels - The Carpenter. It's small, so the lobby kind of blends into the coffee shop. The inside lounge has a mix of wood and leather furniture with a modern feel - think Austin meets Brooklyn with good coffee. What we love about the layout here is, first, the mix of Austin-inspired colors and materials of wood, leather, and different shades of desert browns. Second, the design includes an eclectic mix of sofas, armchairs, and strategically placed plants and lamps. This layout creates two separate groupings that feel intimate and private, even though the area is very small. A layout like this can be an excellent inspiration for event designers who need to rent furniture to create seating areas in small meeting rooms as part of a large conference. Many hotels and resorts host a conference in the main ballroom but also have smaller meeting rooms that need to transform into a coffee or break lounge or just an area for small groups to gather.
The Ace Hotel New York City
Photo: Ace Hotel website
If you really have a lot of tasks to finish, the Ace Hotel in New York is your spot. The lobby is dark, and everyone working on a laptop is either on a Zoom call or deep into writing a code, so it feels like everyone is in the work zone. What do we like about the furniture layout? It feels like a lounge you would create for a conference where, in between sessions, guests need to relax and get some work done. There is a long wooden table with spots to power your laptop and high-top tables with barstools closer to the walls, and this gives guests the option to work on their computers during the conference. Continuous dark leather couches create U-shaped nooks with coffee tables for guests to mingle, which is a good idea to add at a conference so attendees can sit, talk, and connect between sessions. Like the Edition Hotel, there is a long wooden bar at the end of the lounge. This can also work at a conference - an event designer can add a buffet at the end of the lounge to serve snacks and coffee for attendees. At the same time, the buffet facade can also be a space to add conference sponsor logos or images.
Renting furniture for an event is a common task for event planners, but creating a layout for a lounge and putting together the right pieces can be tricky. At Ronen Rental, we help with layout design and suggestions based on guest count and space size. For help designing a lounge area, don’t hesitate to contact us below.