Supercharging Hospitality Design: Rapid Prototyping with Skema’s Design Catalogs
Designers are passionate about creating memorable, experiential spaces, and the hospitality sector is a prime building typology where they can flex their creativity. The real excitement lies in crafting an Instagram-worthy lobby, a grand podium level, and captivating amenity spaces.
Yet even the most iconic hotels come with their fair share of repetitive design elements. Frequently, designers find themselves bogged down in mundane modeling and repetitive design tasks.
That’s where Skema comes in. We focus on accelerating the repetitive aspects of design, giving you more flexibility to invest your time in high-value spaces that matter most to your clients.
For hospitality projects, guest rooms, back-of-house areas, and function wings can be standardized from past projects and repurposed as reusable and morphable unitized design elements. With the Skema Design Catalog, you can easily repurpose your solved designs for new projects.
Great Architecture is More Than Aesthetics - It’s About Value
Architect Jim Balding, who has worked on dozens of hotels with more than 8,000 guest rooms, serves as a key advisor to Skema. Here’s his take on the value Skema adds to the early design process.
Fast-Forward to the Signature Spaces
“By using Skema, you can get the guest room tower to 80% complete very quickly, and with high confidence in those layouts,” says Jim. “That means you can spend your time where you really want to. For me, that means designing the public spaces where the budget allows for more elaborate designs, and that is the fun part, the part that sets you apart as a designer/architect.”
Accurate Project Metrics
Jim adds, “In the hotel industry, every square foot must contribute to the bottom line. With Skema, you are designing in a live environment, making real-time adjustments to meet the owner's program and targets early on. This kind of early analysis helps you avoid costly rework later. You can instantly see if you’re off, and that is so beneficial. It really matters if you’re under 2% or over by half a percent. It not only strengthens your relationship with the client but also maximizes the project’s profitability.”
Morphing: Repetition and New Forms
No discussion of Skema would be complete without a comment on Skema’s Morphing ability. For the first time, designers can easily copy and paste previous BIM models into new designs like puzzle pieces. But they’re not cookie cutters; morphing means they’re flexible so that designers can squeeze or stretch them into new shapes and sizes to resolve the design concept of the building.
When a layout doesn’t quite fit the space available, Skema’s unique Morphing capability lets you easily squeeze or stretch puzzle pieces, even around corners. Designers can create entirely new schemes just by Morphing the layout into new shapes.
Less Rework with BIM in Minutes
As Niknaz Aftahi writes in a recent article in aec+tech,
“A common challenge in design is the transition from the schematic phase to BIM, where significant design intent and hours of work can be lost, often resulting in rework. Because of limitations in traditional BIM workflows, designers frequently have to solve the same design issues across multiple projects, leading to duplicated labor and reduced efficiency.”
Niknaz highlights Skema’s ability to eliminate those pain points.
“Skema solves this by allowing designers to reuse solved designs and models across projects, saving valuable time and resources that can be directed toward innovative, creative tasks.”
Design Automation: From Old Tower to New Boutique
We used our demo hospitality Design Catalog to transform an existing non-orthogonal building into a luxury boutique hotel. For the guest room tower, we applied our Design Catalog units to create a new layout that includes both standard units and morphed units.
To get a taste of Skema’s morphing capability on a hotel tower, here is a short video.
As a Skema subscriber or free trial user, you get full access to our demo projects. Our hospitality demo project is a great way to test drive the software. It’s designed to show just how easy it is to move things around and adapt to unusual shapes.
Once you’ve decided that Skema will work for you, you can create and manage your own custom Design Catalogs, built with your project data and office standards.