Welcome home: Hotels want guests to feel more like residents than visitors

Then describing how his FIRM’S design of the 111-room Strand & Pier Hotel, in the heart of Hermosa Beach, Calif., will capture the essence of that famous surfing town, Don Harrier, AIA, LEED AP, Principal with HKS, waxes nostalgic.

The 12x40-foot guestroom dimensions reflect “longboard proportions,” he says. Finely detailed wood rails, trellises, and partitions “evoke the handcrafted nature of shaping surfboards.” Hermosa Beach was also once a hotspot for jazz, and the hotel’s broken-up massing “takes its cues from jazz notions of syncopated rhythms.”