From Author to Host: Rethinking the Architect’s Role in Hospitality

But hospitality doesn’t really work like that. The places that stay with you are rarely remembered as buildings. They’re remembered as moments. That realisation has changed how I think about designing resorts.

Before working more in hospitality, I spent years in large-scale urban design. Designing masterplans for hundreds of homes teaches you very quickly that lifestyle is shaped by small decisions rather than grand gestures.

The width of a street can change whether someone feels safe walking at night. A well-placed park can connect the same dog walkers every morning. A line of trees can be enough to encourage people to slow down and take a walk.

None of this feels architectural in the traditional sense, yet it has a huge influence on how people live.

When those same ideas are condensed into a resort environment, they become magnified. No walk should ever feel long. Movement should feel natural, interesting, and gently surprising. Guests should sense where they’re going without being told.

In many ways, a good resort functions like a very small, very considered town.

One opinion I’ve grown more confident in over time is that in resorts — and even large homes — the spaces between buildings matter as much as the buildings themselves.

This can feel counterintuitive, especially for architects who love designing objects. But when you watch how guests actually move through a place, it’s rarely the architecture in isolation that defines their experience.

It’s the walk from room to breakfast. The arrival after a long journey. Where families gather in the late afternoon. Where people pause at sunset or drift into conversation.

At Dune, we spend as much time designing these moments as we do the architecture because we know they’re valued just as highly.

Some of the best resorts I’ve stayed in barely reveal their buildings at all. The landscape is confident and layered enough that the architecture recedes, leaving a sequence of experiences that flow together naturally. Interiors and exteriors blur, and buildings become connectors rather than statements.

Guests seem less interested in showy lobbies or material bravado and more interested in places that feel honest and human. The newer definition of luxury is less about spectacle and more about trust — feeling welcome, feeling at ease, and feeling part of something, even briefly.

Architecture has a role in that, but it’s a supporting one.

This is where I think the architect’s role changes. Less as a designer of objects and more as something closer to a host — or even a festival organiser. Someone thinking about optional moments, chance encounters, and spaces where people can opt in without pressure.

Guests are unlikely to remember what stone was used at the front desk. They’re far more likely to remember a sunset drink in a garden room, shared with someone they’d never met before.

Our role is to anticipate where those moments might happen and make room for them. That’s a deeply human opportunity — and one that AI would struggle to truly understand, let alone design.

Buildings still matter. But they sit behind experience rather than in front of it. They provide shade, intimacy, and rhythm. They help interior and exterior dissolve into one another.

When that balance is right, guests don’t talk about the building first. They talk about how the place made them feel.

And that’s often the difference between a resort that looks good and one that stays with you.