A hotel designed today will still be open when today’s forty-year-olds are in their eighties. The question is whether they’ll be able to use it.
Designing for the hundred-year guest means designing hotels that work as well for an 85-year-old with arthritis, a guest with hearing loss or a partially sighted traveller as they do for everyone else – without looking remotely like a hospital. It matters more in the South West than anywhere else in England: at the 2021 Census, 22.3% of the region’s residents were 65 or over, the highest share of any English region.
A tale of two potato peelers
In 1960, the American writer Vance Packard gathered some of the more shameless tricks of post-war manufacturing in The Waste Makers. My favourite is the kitchen-tools company that coloured the handles of its potato peelers to match the peelings. Most people wrapped their peelings in newspaper, the company reasoned, so a peeler put down for a moment would vanish into the bin – and next year it expected to double its sales. A peeler designed to be lost.
Thirty years later, another one was designed to be held. Sam Farber watched his wife, Betsey, struggling to grip an ordinary peeler because of arthritis in her hands, and set out to make one that anyone could hold comfortably. It went on sale in 1990 as one of the first products in OXO’s Good Grips range, and its fat, soft handle now lives in the kitchens of people who have never had a moment’s trouble with their hands.
Same object, two very different questions. The first asks how to sell another one. The second asks who has to use it. Hotels, I’d suggest, are in the second business.
England’s oldest region
The hundred-year guest is no longer a figure of speech. In mid-2022 there were 1.7 million people in the UK aged 85 or over, and the Office for National Statistics projects that number will nearly double, to 3.3 million, by 2047.
The South West is ahead of that curve. At the 2021 Census, 22.3% of the region’s residents were 65 or over – the highest share of any English region, and almost double London’s 11.9%. East Devon had the highest proportion of over-90s anywhere in England and Wales. These are the people who live here, and they are also the parents and grandparents everyone else brings on holiday.
A hotel designed in Devon, Cornwall, Somerset or Dorset today will spend most of its working life welcoming the oldest generation of guests there has ever been. Among them, in thirty or forty years, will be most of the people designing hotels now. It seems only sensible to design rooms we’d be happy to stay in ourselves.
Accessible doesn’t mean wheelchair
Ask most people to picture an accessible hotel room and they picture a wheelchair, because that’s the symbol on the sign. It’s the wrong picture. According to the government’s Family Resources Survey, 16.8 million people in the UK – one in four – are disabled, and most of them don’t use a wheelchair at all. Among people of State Pension age, the figure is closer to one in two.
RNID estimates that more than 18 million people in the UK are deaf, have hearing loss or have tinnitus, including over half of those aged 55 or more and almost 80% of over-70s. Add people who are blind or partially sighted, people with arthritis or a weak grip, people living with dementia and the guest three weeks out of a hip replacement, and you are no longer designing for a minority. You are designing for a large share of everyone who will ever walk through the door.
Yet too many hotels design their standard rooms first and the accessible room afterwards: a double bed, a few cheap grab rails and a spot at the far end of the corridor, designed to satisfy a requirement rather than to welcome anybody. Guests given one by mistake are often unhappy with it. The guests who need one get that experience every time they travel.
More than two kinds of room
The deeper problem is the idea that there are only two kinds of room, standard and accessible, when most guests who need a little help sit somewhere in between. BS 8300, the British Standard for accessible and inclusive design, already recognises several kinds of accessible bedroom, from rooms for wheelchair users and rooms with a ceiling hoist to rooms with a bathroom for guests who can walk but need support. I’d go further and think of the whole hotel in tiers:
| Tier | Where | What it includes |
| Every room | All bedrooms | Level threshold, lever handles, walk-in shower, switches where a hand naturally reaches, a bed at a sensible height with space either side, a chair with arms, clear contrast between surfaces, a wardrobe rail reachable from a seat, walls reinforced for future rails |
| Some rooms | Close to the lift | Grab rails already fitted, fold-down shower seat and riser rail, slightly higher WC, a second door viewer at seated height, a fridge for medication |
| Any room, on request | Kept in store | Vibrating pillow pad and flashing fire-alarm beacon, portable hearing loop, shower stool |
| Fully accessible | Including family rooms and suites | Turning space, ceiling hoist track, connecting door for a carer |
Then tell guests exactly what each room has, with photographs and measurements, so they can choose for themselves rather than ringing reception to ask, or finding out on arrival.
On one recent project, a large part of the clientele were racing drivers and motorcycle racers, many of whom have picked up injuries over the years. They have money, they have needs, and they want the best rooms in the house as much as anyone. A hotel that treats them as an afterthought lets down exactly the guests it most wants.
Plywood, contrast and the mum test
The detail I’d most like every developer to understand costs almost nothing. Fix a sheet of plywood inside the bathroom walls before the tiles go on. Twenty or forty years later, when a guest needs a grab rail – or when the hotel’s guests have simply grown older – the rail goes on in an hour, and nobody can tell it wasn’t always there. Without it, the tiles come off, the replacements never quite match, and the bathroom carries a scar for the rest of its life. I don’t know a cheaper way of designing for a guest who hasn’t arrived yet.
Contrast is the next cheapest win. A polished floor meeting a polished wall in a similar tone can make the edge of a room disappear for a partially sighted guest, and glare troubles most of us more as we get older. The guidance behind the Building Regulations looks for a difference of around 30 points of light reflectance value between surfaces that need to read against each other. Kate’s test is simpler: photograph the scheme in black and white. If it flattens into one long mid-grey, it has no depth for a sighted guest and no edges for a partially sighted one. For a guest living with dementia, a dark doormat can look like a hole.
Then there is what I call the mum test. If my mum can’t work it without instructions, it has failed. Anyone who has tried to turn up the heater in a new car by prodding a featureless touchscreen knows the feeling; a blind guest gets it every time they try to change the temperature in a room with a glass control panel. Give people switches and dials they can find in the dark, recognise by shape and turn with confidence. On one recent project we fitted hand-drawn curtains with a four-metre drop that run beautifully with the lightest pull. Motorising them would have added around £1,500 a set, and made them harder to use for exactly the guests who most need them to be easy.
The kerb-cut effect, and the money
In the 1970s, wheelchair users in California campaigned for the kerbs at street corners to be cut down so that they could cross the road. The dropped kerbs turned out to be used by everyone with a pushchair, a bicycle, a delivery trolley or a suitcase. It’s now known as the kerb-cut effect, and hotels are full of it. Every level threshold and step-free entrance put in for a wheelchair is used many times a day by guests dragging wheeled luggage. Lever handles, chairs you can get out of without a run-up, logical rooms and a frictionless check-in help everyone – and plenty of guests of a certain age who would never describe themselves as having accessible needs benefit most of all.
There is a hard commercial case too. VisitEngland estimates that people with an impairment, and those travelling with them, spend £14.6 billion a year on trips in England. Yet 45% of disabled people didn’t take a single overnight holiday in England in the previous year, against 34% of non-disabled people, and one in four domestic holidaymakers with access requirements return to places they have stayed before. When IHG’s voco Manchester – City Centre invested in accessible facilities, it reported £217,000 of additional revenue in its first full year of trading. And a disabled guest rarely travels alone: the booking a hotel loses is seldom for one person.
Accessible design isn’t a specialism bolted onto a hotel designed for everyone else. Get a space right for the guest who needs it most and you will almost always have got it right for everyone. It is how we approach space planning and technical design on every project, from new builds to country house conversions where level access and lifts have to be threaded through buildings that never imagined them.
Frequently asked questions
What is inclusive hotel design?
Inclusive hotel design means rooms and public spaces that work for guests of all ages and abilities – including people with mobility, sight, hearing or cognitive impairments – without looking clinical. Sibley Grove treats it as part of good design rather than a separate specialism.
How many accessible rooms should a hotel have?
It depends on local planning policy; in London, for example, new hotels are asked to make one bedroom in ten wheelchair-accessible, or a larger share accessible in other ways. Beyond the minimum, Sibley Grove recommends tiers: basic accessibility in every room, enhanced features in some, portable equipment for any room, and fully accessible family rooms and suites.
Why does accessible design matter more in the South West?
At the 2021 Census, 22.3% of South West residents were 65 or over, the highest share of any English region, and East Devon had the highest proportion of over-90s in England and Wales. Hotels in Devon, Cornwall, Somerset and Dorset serve the oldest local population in England, along with the families who come to visit them.
What is the cheapest way to future-proof a hotel bathroom for older guests?
Reinforce the walls behind the tiles with plywood during construction, so grab rails can be fixed anywhere later without breaking tiles. It costs very little at the time and avoids a visible repair later.
Is there a commercial case for accessible hotel rooms?
Yes. VisitEngland estimates that people with an impairment and their travelling companions spend £14.6 billion a year on trips in England, and guests with access requirements are loyal: one in four domestic holidaymakers with access needs return to accommodation they have stayed in before.
