Nearly every trend report for 2025 is saying that amenities are leaning more personalized and user focused. The interesting part of that is it’s not industry specific; it is across the board for offices, travel and hospitality, multifamily, and single family. HqO, a leading office building operations company, has conducted research that stresses, “Understanding tenant preferences is crucial for landlords looking to provide spaces that attract and retain top tenants.” Forrester Consulting, in collaboration with Adobe, conducted extensive online surveys that also show this trend in travel and hospitality. According to its executive summary, “Personalization can help travel and hospitality (T&H) companies rise up from recent turbulence with renewed strength and competitive differentiation,” while multiple other hospitality reports are saying similar things. From Ogilvy One’s most recent reports on brand loyalty, “The overarching takeaway is this: Brands that connect with people on a deep emotional and behavioral level are the ones that people tend to stick with.” All this research backs up what many of us have been seeing for a while now: Amenities cannot be a predetermined list that we check the boxes on. Rather, they need to be developed through a flexible process that assesses the ever-changing user needs and behaviors of our targeted demographic.
There are a couple of ways we approach this during our property positioning and space planning phases. While targeted demographics and geographics are a mainstay in research conducted prior to design, we’ve seen a shift to more intuitive design and being aware of psychographics and behaviors as well. This approach allows us to offer spaces that accommodate different levels of social interaction to meet a broader range of needs and expectations. We can objectively view generational divides and similarities, consider introverts and extroverts and everything in between, tech savvy and tech averse, and a range of high activity to quiet meditative offerings. This method also leads to more flexible solutions for operations and more personalized living spaces and guest rooms.
The other approach is looking at amenities through a lens of “customary, elevated and unexpected.” Customary amenities are the essential offerings that are standard and expected, like a mailroom, club room or onsite parking. Elevated amenities are things a consumer is willing to pay more money for. They can be things like meditation rooms, co-working pods with integrated technology or community gardens. In general, these are amenities that can be found in competitive properties, but they aren’t common or widespread. Unexpected amenities are the ones that truly set a property apart, like recording studios, infrared saunas or indoor pickleball courts. While this may sound like another way to check the box, what is considered customary, elevated or unexpected must be considered specific to the property. For example, a property may not have a fitness space, typically considered essential, because of the proximity to a nearby facility. In that case, tenants might not consider it a loss. Successful properties take cues from the local community, demographics and psychographics, and are a competitive mix of all three amenity levels. —Christina Johnson is creative director of Phoenix- and San Francisco-based Private Label International (privatelabelintl.com), a full-service interior design studio that develops hospitality environments and lifestyle brand experiences for clients worldwide
Christina Johnson is creative director of Phoenix- and San Francisco-based Private Label International, a full-service interior design studio that develops hospitality environments and lifestyle brand experiences for clients worldwide.
Photo of 3Co Theater & Recording, courtesy of Private Label International
