Editor’s note: Expanding upon the Design feature in the January-February issue of HOTELS Magazine, this first of a three-part multimedia web series about the newly-opened Le Méridien Chicago – Oakbrook Center examines the evolution of Starwood’s Le Méridien Hotels & Resorts brand. The second part explains owner RockBridge’s concepts and strategies for this project, and the final entry covers Wischermann Partners’ third-party management perspective.
Brand: The right fit
Given its market, Starwood’s upscale Le Méridien brand was not the most obvious choice for the 172-room Le Méridien Chicago – Oakbrook Center, Oak Brook, Illinois.
“I was concerned how Le Méridien would be perceived by the local business community,” said Simon Fricker, the hotel’s opening general manager. “As the ‘new kid on the block,’ in addition to a brand that is relatively unknown in North America, what if we weren’t accepted into the community?”
However, what the brand lacked in awareness in the local market, it made up for with the numbers of business travelers it could bring to the property, especially through its loyalty program. At the same time, the recently completed brand refresh provided the hotel with a more unique and expectedly appealing identity.
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Fresh take
Back in 2012, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Stamford, Connecticut, revealed the “Le Méridien Hub” lobby concept as a major component of the brand refresh and which subsequently played a big role in determining the design of the Le Méridien Chicago – Oakbrook Center lobby.
The original Oak Brook hotel entrance was found in a driveway that the new owner, RockBridge, Columbus, Ohio, enclosed and converted into the larger public areas that the Hub requires, including a Longitude café/bar.
“A very wise decision was taken very early on by the ownership groups to close in the driveway and expand the space,” said Julie Frank, global director of design for Le Méridien. “Flanked by this blue glass wall, Justus Roe’s mural and the other art installations, this is going to create this really energized and vibrant space that our guests will want to hang out in by day for coffee, or by night for cocktails.”
In fact, the Oak Brook hotel’s artwork choices and themes reflect the updated Le Méridien brand essence of unlocking a destination, an aesthetic choice that Starwood has moved toward since buying the brand in November 2005.
“The first few years were spent taking a collection of about 130 hotels that really had nothing tying them together and figuring out how we wanted to position the brand,” said Brian Povinelli, senior vice president, global brand leader for Starwood’s Westin and Le Méridien brands. “We also worked on cleaning up the portfolio. We spent a lot of time over the first few years after the acquisition taking out properties we didn’t feel would meet the vision for this brand and it ended up being about 60 hotels that we removed.”
Starwood then focused on creating an upper-upscale identity for the brand focused on its European heritage and contemporary art. Since then the brand has evolved to include more mid-Century style, Swiss graphic design, as well as Monocle magazine and Saul Bass film title sequence design influences to achieve a broader positioning.
“That not only influenced the collateral, but how we designed the F&B program as the éclairs have sprinkles that are really influenced by Saul Bass, too,” said Ravi Hampole, Starwood’s vice president, creative director, graphic design.
Here is a YouTube video that further explains the Le Méridien brand refresh:
Mike Tiedy, Starwood’s senior vice president of innovation and design, said that the brand’s target customer is a “curiosity seeker – that person who strives to find the next conversation and a new interest. … We try to tease their curiosity in some way, shape or form.”
Starwood describes these travelers as looking to get a little bit more out of a destination, leave with a story to tell and want to feel like they have seen something unique or different.
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With the brand refresh comes a change in the use of art, which is reflected both at new properties like Le Méridien Chicago – Oakbrook Center and also increasingly throughout the Le Méridien portfolio of 100 hotels worldwide.
“The implementation of this is really happening now and I think it will play out over the next two to three years. It takes time to evolve and experience and to implement new programming,” Povinelli said. “We’re 100 hotels today, with the goal of being at 200 hotels 10 years from now. To expand and be a mass brand at that scale on a global basis, we need to be sure that we have a proposition that is more universally relatable.”
Where the brand is going
Starwood trumpets this design aesthetic for Le Méridien as working well for conversion, new-build and adaptive reuse projects like Le Méridien Chicago – Oakbrook Center.
“Like your own house and your own living room, you can customize that space to make it a reflection of who you are,” Tiedy said. “We take that attitude with Le Méridien when we work with a developer, when we work with an owner and how we bring it to life.”
In terms of how the brand fits into the larger upscale lifestyle segment, Povinelli anticipated that the segment will undergo a gradual squeeze as customer expectations rise and more “cheap chic” select-service lifestyle properties open, a trend now being broadly seen in North America and Europe.
In fact, Starwood and Povinelli like to point to broader shifts in consumer expectations as driving this.
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To ensure its continued expansion, Le Méridien’s differentiation will be paramount in attracting both customers and owners, and Povinelli asserts that the brand’s mid-century modern mixed with local flavors and accents provide this differentiation.
Combined with the business brought by Starwood’s loyalty program Starwood Preferred Guest, which brings about half of occupancy at Le Méridiens, Starwood is expanding the brand with owners like RockBridge.
The story continues here from the owner’s perspective.