I came up with a room-naming culture for a new luxury hotel

I worked with a luxury hotel company that was creating a new hotel – a hotel reimagined from top to bottom for a younger, more digitally-savvy customer.

They came into a problem with the room names. Marriage suite, presidential suite, whatever – these would not work. But what would work? That was my task. Come up with a new concept/conceit for the room names.

The agency that called me in had already come up with some ideas: types of brainwaves (one type of room is gamma, another is delta, etc.); tech figures from history (Berners Lee, Jobs, Tesla, etc.). To my mind this was neither intuitive nor really fulfilling the brief.

My concept was simple: look at top-end digital products. Smartphones, MacBooks, etc. They all follow the same format: an unchanging brand name like iPhone or Galaxy, followed by their sequence or function within the series, or, more interestingly, by specifications. Galaxy Z Fold. MacBook Pro 14-Inch. iPhone 14 Plus.

Now apply the same concept to the guestrooms, bringing each room’s attributes to life by coding them as specifications.

Then you can configure this any way you want. Name the room based on the hotel brand. Decide what are the key elements you want to bring out – size, terrace views, number of beds, whatever. And a whole new way of naming rooms emerges, a naming culture that could also apply across multiple elements of the hotel.