Craft House founder speaks with Dezeen

Shifting Hospitality

Dezeen's Eleanor Gibson spoke to a panel of experts about how hospitality and travel design is changing in this panel discussion filmed by Dezeen for the Radical Innovation Award.

When Dezeen's Eleanor Gibson assembled a panel of experts for the Radical Innovation Award, the conversation that followed touched on ideas that feel more relevant now than when the cameras were rolling.

Craft House Consulting founder Yvette Jong joined Radical Innovation Award founder John Hardy, architect Danny Forster, and James Woods from WeWork for a wide-ranging discussion filmed by Dezeen — exploring how sustainability, co-living, and emerging technologies are reshaping the way hospitality spaces are designed, experienced, and remembered.

The conversation covered ground that sits at the heart of what Craft House thinks about every day:

Sustainability as structure, not decoration. The panel explored how the most forward-thinking hospitality projects are moving beyond sustainability as a marketing claim toward sustainability as a founding design principle — where the choices made at concept stage determine not just how a building looks, but how it lives within its environment and community for decades.

Co-living and the blurring of categories. The rise of co-living has forced the hospitality industry to ask a question it should have been asking all along: what do people actually need from a space, and how do we design for that rather than for convention? The answers are reshaping everything from boutique hotels to private membership clubs — spaces that are increasingly designed around how people want to live, work, and connect rather than around room categories and star ratings.

Technology in service of human experience. The most interesting technology in hospitality isn't the kind guests notice. It's the kind that disappears into the background and makes every interaction feel more personal, more considered, and more effortless. The panel explored how emerging technologies are being used not to replace human connection but to create the conditions for more of it.

The guest experience as the design brief. Perhaps the most enduring theme of the conversation was the shift from designing spaces to designing experiences — from asking "what does this look like?" to asking "what does this feel like, and what does it make possible?" It's a shift that is transforming boutique hotels, private clubs, and destination properties alike — and one that Craft House has been advocating for since the beginning.

This is the kind of conversation the industry needs more of. Watch the full panel discussion below.