The hospitality industry’s seven-year disposal cycle is costing owners millions, and it’s entirely avoidable.
At the start of my design career, over twenty years ago, I was standing on a building site in Nottingham watching skip after skip being filled with perfectly good materials. Furniture, joinery, carpets, tiles and appliances, all heading to be burnt or buried. The building wasn’t being demolished. It was simply being refurbished.
That moment troubled me for several reasons. Clearly it was wasteful, but it was also environmentally negligent, economically short-sighted, but also obviously unnecessary. The design, completed a few years prior, had locked the client into that wasteful outcome from day one. Every permanently bonded finish. Every hybrid material impossible to separate. Every substandard product. These were decisions made at the design stage that guaranteed waste seven to ten years later.
The Seven-Year Disposal Cycle
On average, hotels refurbish every seven to ten years. Sometimes it’s because materials have failed. Sometimes new owners want to add value or incorporate new technologies and operational efficiencies. Perhaps competitors have appeared and a refresh is required to remain relevant. So we rip out perfectly functional furniture, demolish serviceable joinery, and send materials to landfill that could have been maintained, refinished, or recirculated.
Over a 20 year period with refurbishments every 7 years, a typical hotel room refurbishment generates approximately 77,000 kg of CO₂. For a 150-room property, that’s nearly 58,000 transatlantic flights’ worth of emissions, just from replacing furniture and finishes on a standard refurbishment cycle. We accept this as inevitable. It isn’t.
Design for Disassembly: The Practical Alternative
I recently visited a project we designed a few years ago, watching its first refresh. In a conventional project, this would mean skips full of furniture, demolished finishes, and a budget similar to that of the original fit-out. Instead, the furniture frames were kept and refinished. The architectural joinery was maintained. Panels and sheet materials held in place by mechanical fixings, were swapped out and sent back to manufacturers for reuse or recycling.
The refresh cost was 40% less than a conventional refurbishment and generated 75% less carbon. This isn’t about adding cost or complexity, it is simply an alternative strategy at the design stage. Mechanical fixings instead of adhesives. Materials that age and patina rather than scratch, chip and deteriorate. Joinery and furniture designed so materials can separate for repair, refurbishment or reuse. Modular elements that can be reconfigured without demolition. Sustainability in fit-out requires interior designers and architects to understand construction, not just styling. Designing services independently of decorative elements, designing in access for maintenance and repair, detailing for disassembly to aid reuse and refurbishment. This is not more expensive. It is simply good design.
The Numbers That Change the Conversation
The most persistent myth in sustainable hospitality design is that it costs more. In terms of managing the initial capital cost, the key is to fully understand the difference between value engineering and quality reduction. Absolutely, we can build cheaper if we accept poorer quality items that look the same. But that is not an apples and apples scenario. We can manage cost in many ways. For example, we designed an 80-bedroom hotel in Riyadh a few years ago where the client wanted to save $300 per wardrobe. Rather than reducing quality, we simplified the design — but reducing the quality of construction and materials was non-negotiable. We saved $500 per wardrobe, $40,000 across the project.
Based on the flawed financial model that many hotels are locked into, a conventionally designed 100-room hotel requires approximately four complete refurbishments over 30 years, each similar in cost to the original. Based on figures from one of our 4-star projects in West London, the total refurbishment cost would be approximately £26 million over a 30 year period. This hotel was designed for disassembly, with circular design principles at its core and therefore only needs targeted updates and restoration rather than wholesale changes. Over 30 years this would cost around £16 million. That’s an £8 million saving, a 40% reduction in total lifecycle cost from thinking differently at the design stage.
On a 300-key hotel, poorly considered decisions around the integration of lighting, sockets, switches and distribution boards can easily translate into £500,000 of avoidable cost as it complicates the next refurbishment cycle. This isn’t sustainability as a marketing exercise. This is money left on the table because no one asked the right questions early enough.
The question for developers, operators, and designers isn’t whether we can afford to prioritise longevity and disassembly. It’s whether we can afford the alternative: an industry built on a seven-year disposal cycle that destroys value, generates waste, and repeats itself indefinitely. In a world where hospitality is under increasing pressure, and project viability is on a knife edge, design decisions no longer impact how profitable a project is, they determine whether it is profitable or loses money. We know how to design differently. The details aren’t difficult. What’s required is the will to ask different questions at the start of every project, before a single glued joint is specified, before a single hybrid material is chosen, before the design locks in a wasteful outcome years before it happens.
