Hotel Design Notes: customizable room sizes
Hotel design isn't something that I've paid a lot of attention to in the past (esp not compared to airplane design!), but now that I'm staying in a bunch of them, I'm beginning to note some interesting things.
The hotel I'm at now, the Hilton Palacio del Rio in San Antonio, is actually a stop on the river boat tours.
It's because back in the 1960s, it broke ground in modular architecture. All of the rooms were prefabricated, with beds and furniture inside already, and stacked on top of each other with a crane! Not surprisingly, each room is pretty much the same size.
By contrast, in the Microtel we stayed at in Mobile/Daphne, AL, the design template calls for three different sized rooms - by varying the exterior perimeter.
You can see in this floor plan the different sized rooms - I think there are singles, doubles, and suites.
It reminds me of this cake pan from Konstantin Slawinski. Rather than having the cake server vary the angle of the slices to produce different sizes, it varies the entire exterior of the cake to give different volumes!
