Slow, the new word for luxury

Serdar Kutucu has deep understanding of the travel industry and hoteliers needs paired with his wealth of experience in marketing, communication and consultancy.

After being appointed COO of Design Hotels, in the heart of pandemic crisis he launches, as a real visionary the Slow collective a new concept of luxury hotels. It’s interesting to read his vision, deployed in the following interview.

How did you come up with the idea of Slow collective?

Travel and hospitality have always been my passion. I personally have been visiting many hotels and meeting entrepreneurs in this industry over the last 12 years, my business partner Claus Sendlinger has been the founder of Design Hotels 27 years ago.

There is a lot of inspiration we gained from these people and places. We have been guiding the positioning and re-positioning of many hotels in many countries, San Giorgio Mykonos (now Soho Roc House) for example has been one of our initiatives in the year 2012, where we re-launched it together with its new management for a new target group as a “Design Hotels Project”. We were always dreaming of our own places.

We are committed to the overall slow movement, it is a cultural revolution against the notion that faster is always better. The Slow philosophy is not about doing everything at a snail’s pace. it’s about seeking to do everything at the right speed and properly.

What is practically a Slow hotel?

The future of travel will face major challenges that will demand that hospitality businesses embrace innovation and new technologies. Hotels will be the new community hubs, providing everything from libraries to wellness clinics, learning programs and platforms for guests and locals to interact and have new experiences. The Slow hotel is a place to simply feel good, such experience should come with a healthier, wealthier and happier being. Every place still has a unique theme it focuses on, which comes from its local environment and culture. 

We consider the future traveler’s needs, creating a premium through a holistic guest experience, encompassing cultural programming, social interaction, on-site content strategy, outstanding architecture and design, and a fresh, localized approach to sustainability and social impact.

“Maybe the virus was just an emissary from the future. The drastic message is: Human civilization has become too dense, too fast, and overheated. It is racing too swiftly in a direction in which there is no future”, says the trend forecaster Matthias Horx. In which ways can we step back, pivot and take actions for a more meaningful life?

The epidemic will offer a blank page for a new beginning. Eventually allowing humanity to reset its values. We are starting a new future that will require a deeper sense of consciousness in everything we are doing. I see an opportunity in redefining competition into collaboration.

The last years have really been worrying because of such a selfish society. We will move into a more collectivist culture and that’s good.

I would be grateful for a more conscious, more human, and more empathic humanity, facing environmental challenges, as well as supporting the mental health of our society for a better future. Travelers will value transformative experiences that enable them to interact with and contribute to local communities while also pursuing destinations that help them to retreat and recharge from the hectic urban lifestyle. Ultimately, the new travel horizon will be one that asks not where or how, but why.

The slow movement in architecture was championed by Michael Sorkin, whose terrible lose we recently experienced because of the Corona virus. Is your approach somehow relevant to this point of view?

The world has lost a great architect who has been committed to a more equitable and sustainable urban planning, and to create beautiful cities for our planet. We are absolutely aligned with Sorkin’s philosophy.

Ultimately we want to share with others, to abandon the sense of self that obsesses us, to learn how to work and live together and to embrace the idea of the alter ego, humans are sharing space, joining groups and working together, trying out new forms of living in harmony. Slow Architecture and Design focus on process, origin and materials, while valuing the environment and the individual.

“By 2024, personal and experiential luxury alone are estimated to be a €1,1260 billion market—a significant increase from €845 billion in 2015” says the Boston Consulting Group. In the day after the corona virus, is experiential luxury going to be de ned in the same way as it is now?

According to the new normal the values and mindset of future travelers will drive innovation in the travel sector. It needs new concepts, services and approaches. Sustainability and luxury travel will be expected to be synonymous, both in the environmental sense and from a cultural perspective.

The luxury industry will continue growing but the added value will be found in the intangible, the experience, emotions and the intellectual, more than in any product. Brands have to become more empathic and humble, branding will be more subtle.

Is the idea of collective living in hospitality an innovation?

Hotels are actually the origin of the idea for co-living. However it has been re-discovered in a new interpretation recently, an idea born from the shared economy especially in the real estate business. Hybrid concepts reflect the rapidly changing intersection of home, work, and hospitality in a single, community-building universe. We will see more of these coming and the concepts will have to be proved and improved constantly.

If you had to inspire the Greek architects, which international examples of “slow architecture” would you recommend?

It’s not really about architecture, it’s how the ingredients of a place are integrated with each other. In fact good architecture, design and sustainability are common sense for us today, but architecture could think beyond drawing boards, to imagine atmosphere and feelings for a more meaningful experience and creating an added value through such space.

What knowledge is gained after 11 years of building and nurturing a community of creative hoteliers and sophisticated travelers through designhotels.com? Both business wise and design wise?

Our business model at Design Hotels allowed a constant evolution, I’d say this is what made us stand out in many ways. We have developed our own in-house creative team which helped to implement any good idea immediately.

This is needed as the travel and hospitality segment of independent hotels has grown so fast in the last decade especially, every hotel now wants to be “boutique”, while our passion was to define the evolution in our niche of lifestyle hotels. Design Hotels has been able to create a community of the most creative hoteliers in the world, these people are game changers, many of them not grown in this industry and this is why they think things differently. My passion today, the learnings and inspiration I gained mostly comes from this community, which we called our “Originals”.