Design opportunities everywhere

I’m always paying attention to design when I go places. I can’t help but look at each hotel, each aircraft interior, each terminal, with a critical eye.

John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York is a tragedy. It started with a heroic design — I mean, look at the old T.W.A. terminal — but then it devolved into this patchwork of buildings that were added on later. It’s horrible now. There’s no sense of place. There are no windows that open up to the sky. You’re always on edge. Everything is tiny, boxed-in and claustrophobia-inducing.

On the other hand, you really get a sense of a place when you land at Sukarno-Hatta International Airport, serving Jakarta. There are gate pavilions that look like traditional Indonesian houses, with a wood roof and open slats so that the air moves through. You know where you are. It’s very unairport-like.

This may sound elitist, but the best airplane interiors are on private jets. And that’s not saying much. Most of them are so overdone, with overstuffed sofas and gold-rimmed tables, and they look like the inside of a rec room. But at least they’re more comfortable than the commercial aircraft interiors I’ve seen.

Everyone seems to rave about how Emirates has the best service and cabin interiors, but I think it’s way over the top, with a cacophony of decorations and carpet on the wall. It’s like sitting in the most ostentatious living room on earth. It’s decoration, not design. The little cabins for first-class passengers are like jail cells.

The worst designs are in hotels. There’s a popular hotel in Dubai, for instance. To me it’s “I Dream of Jeannie” goes to Disneyland on acid. Think of all the worst clichés and then exaggerate them tenfold. There’s no style. Nothing of beauty. No taste. It’s not about the guest, it’s about the show. People assume that if you put more colors, more patterns, more texture into a hotel, you have more taste. But the exact opposite is true.

A great hotel interior has to elicit an emotion response using light, color, proportion and form. You edit those things to make them work, and you create a journey for the guest. Even a bad design can be undone. When my partner, George Yabu, and I handled the renovation of the Sofitel Los Angeles, we knew we had to get rid of the low ceilings. So we removed the ceiling and cut into the second floor, creating a cavernous grand room in the lobby with a sensuous staircase at the end.

At the reopening of the Sofitel a few months ago, a young hotshot Hollywood agent cornered me and whispered: “What have you done?”

“What do you mean?” I asked, surprised.

“I used to come here to break up with my girlfriends,” he said. “It was perfect. The lobby was small and discrete. Nobody would come here because it was so awful.”

I nodded.

“I can’t do that here!”

As I smiled, the word “here” echoed against the cathedral ceilings.

Glenn Pushelberg is a partner at the interior design firm Yabu Pushelberg Inc., in New York.

Christopher Elliott is the author of Scammed: How to Save Your Money and Find Better Service in a World of Schemes, Swindles, and Shady Deals. Critics have called it “eye-opening” and “inspiring” — it’ll “grab your attention and won’t let go.” Order your copy now on Amazon, Barnes & Noble or iTunes.

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