Boutique Design | boutiquedesign.com

(September / October 2011) posted on Fri Sep 09, 2011

Taking Flight: Anthony Laurino’s makeover of the Custom Hotel near LAX involved fixing its quirks and finding a suitable design theme.

By Matthew Hall

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Shortly after getting hired by the Joie de Vivre chain to redesign its recently acquired Custom Hotel in Los Angeles, Anthony Laurino made a site visit and found himself in a cave. Or, at least it felt that way. “The hotel’s original corridors were very dark, with black carpet and dark gray walls and ceilings,” Laurino says.

Those gloomy hallways were just one of several design challenges Laurino faced in updating the Custom. The 12-story property first opened in 1975 as the Furama Hotel, and subsequently underwent a $20 million renovation and rechristening as the Custom in 2007. Located roughly three miles from the main terminal at Los Angeles International Airport, the Custom promoted itself as “the only true boutique in close proximity to LAX.”

In announcing the acquisition of that locale last fall, Joie de Vivre founder Chip Conley said that in addition to putting the Custom through another renovation, his firm would also use it “as an incubator for some creative ideas that have yet to be applied to the world of hospitality.” To oversee both those efforts, Conley turned to Laurino, who served as Joie de Vivre’s first in-house art director before starting his own design firm a few years ago.

Laurino decided that one of the first things that needed fixing at the hotel was its main entrance. Under the layout he inherited, guests walked along a driveway on the side of the building before making a turn and entering the hotel via doors on the back of the building. “It was an odd and confusing setup,” says Laurino, “and the hotel’s entrance had zero street visibility.”

Laurino moved the entry to the side of the building, placing it under a canopy that’s visible from the street out front. (Space limitations at the latter locale precluded moving the entrance there.) “The result is a more welcoming guest-arrival experience,” says Laurino.

Then there was the question of what to do about those dark hallways. Laurino’s solution was to install honeycomb-patterned wall coverings. “That was a simple and cost-effective way of bringing some personality and texture to the corridors, while also creating a visual distraction from their overall darkness,” he says.