Serviced accommodation lives and dies on the design. Firstly, faced with a grid of near-identical listings, a guest gives each about three seconds before the thumb moves on, and the verdict forms faster still, in a fraction of a second, before a single word of the description is read. It is not a considered judgement, it is a feeling, and the only question the guest is really answering is how does this make me feel. The image that wins is the one that lets them look and think that's a bit of me, somewhere they can already see themselves, comfortable, relaxed and at home. That is the job of the hero image, the one frame we choose from a full professional shoot to lead the listing, and stopping the scroll is where every booking begins.

It helps to be honest about what a guest is actually buying. They sleep in the bed for a few hours and use the kitchen for a little while, and of course both have to be right. But that is the small part. Almost everything they are paying for is how the room looks, how it feels to walk into and how they remember it afterwards. That is not decoration added once the real work is done. In serviced accommodation it is the product. Design is not the thing you add at the end. It is the thing you are selling.

This is why design pays at both ends of the stay. At the front it wins the scroll, and the booking that follows lifts both occupancy and nightly rate, which is where profit is actually made. Across our properties guests rate the stay better value despite using having higher occupancy while guests paying more a night than the listings around them. Good photography on its own has been valued at around $2,500 a year of extra revenue on a single listing.

Then the same design does its second and more important job. It meets the hopes the photograph raised and gives the guest the home from home they came for, and that is what they write about afterwards. At that property, 85% of guests left a review in the first fourteen months, and in this business reviews are the real driver, because every glowing one carries the next guest back to the top of the search and keeps the flywheel turning.

 

Every room below was designed first for the guest who would stay in it, then photographed so the one image we choose can do its work in a stranger's three seconds.

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Our clients property design is curated by Samantha at The Ticking Stripe - a heritage led design studio.