The Luxury Hotel Industry Has A People Problem

Somewhere around your fortieth hotel lobby, something shifts. You stop seeing them. Not because they’re bad — often they’re quite beautiful — but because they’re not really saying anything. The materials are expensive. The light is considered. There’s a scent. You’ve smelled it before, in a different city, at a different property, from a different brand that somehow arrived at the same scent. It’s “luxury.” You check in and go to your room and the whole exchange leaves no particular impression, which is its own kind of failure.

Scott Miller has been thinking about this problem for more than twenty years, which is a long time to think about anything. He’s worked across four continents, ollaborating with Four Seasons, Six Senses and Rosewood. He was most recently Director of North America for London-based 1508, and before that, Global Director at AvroKO. He has, in other words, been inside the machine. This spring he left it to build something else: Ensemble, a hospitality design and strategy studio that is trying — ambitiously, possibly quixotically — to make hotels feel like somewhere again. Scott has been working behind the scenes on Ensemble since June 2025, publicly launched the studio this spring.

“The word luxury is probably the most overused one in hospitality today by a wide margin,” he says, which is the kind of observation that sounds obvious until you consider how many people are still deploying the word as if it means something. “Previously you could differentiate with lavish material selections, a suite of amenities, and using the word ‘wellness’ in one way or another. That is table stakes now.”

He is describing a guest who has caught up to the industry. By 2030, millennials and Gen Z will make up roughly 70 percent of a luxury market worth over $400 billion . These are people who have stayed at the best hotels in the world and can compare them in real time, from a phone, over breakfast. They are not easily impressed and they are not particularly interested in being told that something is luxurious. They want to feel it — or, more to the point, they want to feel like someone thought about them specifically, not just about guests in aggregate.

“They want to walk into a hotel and know exactly where they are,” Miller says. “Not feel like they could be in any city in the world.”

Luxury As A Way Of Being

This is the founding argument of Ensemble: that most hospitality design arrives too late, after the decisions that actually shape a guest’s experience have already been made. By the time a designer gets the brief, the positioning is locked, the programme is set, the budget has been decided. What’s left is decoration. And decoration, however well executed, cannot fix a confused concept.

“The decisions that most profoundly shape the guest experience — the positioning, the programme, the spatial strategy — are often made before the designer is in the room,” Miller says. “By the time interiors begin, the framework is locked and the designer is decorating someone else’s assumptions rather than challenging them.”

To fix this, Miller has built the studio around people who have sat on the other side of that conversation. Nicole Campion spent years as Design Director at Auberge Resorts Collection, which means she knows what it looks like when a luxury brand has to express itself across wildly different landscapes and still feel coherent. Candace Hickman shaped members’ clubs across the Americas at Soho House, where the expectation is that the space itself does a significant portion of the social work. Chris Johnson comes from Union Square Hospitality Group and brings the thing that most design firms conspicuously lack: a serious understanding of how a restaurant actually operates, from the kitchen out. Andrés Lamos, Director of Design Operations, came up through AvroKO, Meyer Davis and Pelli Clarke Pelli and handles what Miller calls architectural rigor — the part where beautiful ideas meet structural reality.

The studio’s debut project, The Paradise Valley Hotel & Casitas, is a 95-key new build in Arizona owned by Walton Global and operated by Noble House Hotels & Resorts. The key number there is 95. Paradise Valley and Scottsdale are grand-resort territory — large properties that have been dominant for decades. At this scale, intimacy becomes a genuine competitive position rather than a marketing line. Ensemble was brought in before the design phase entirely, developing the hotel’s positioning, identifying guest archetypes, building spatial strategies around how those specific people would move through the property. By the time anyone was choosing materials, every decision had a rationale behind it. The result, at least in concept, is a property that reads more like a private home than a resort. A lobby conceived as a living room. One of the few indoor fireplaces in Scottsdale. A courtyard that Hickman describes as a desert duality — bright and open by day, fire pits glowing by night — and a spa that plays with contrasts of light and shadow, hot and cold, stone and bloom. References to the region that you feel rather than read off the wall.

In Boston, Ensemble is designing a new American brasserie adjacent to the Four Seasons for A Street Hospitality. The concept came from the client: the romance of luxury train travel. Miller and Lamos took that not as a decorative brief — no locomotive prints, no conductor hats — but as a structural one. A train journey is a sequence. You move through spaces that each have their own mood, their own tempo, and you get a glimpse of what’s ahead before you arrive.

The restaurant works the same way. At the back is the Emerald Lounge, saturated in jewel tones, visible through a screened wall, designed specifically to make you wonder how you get in. The answer, presumably, is that you know someone.

Luxury With A Twist

The third project is the strangest of the three. Carriage House Training is a private performance club coming to SoHo, backed by figures from professional sport and built around the idea that elite athletic methodology should be available to people with ordinary goals. Miller’s pitch is that the discipline of hospitality design — the obsessive thinking about how a person moves through a space, how they feel before they’ve registered where they are — applies equally here. The design communicates discipline and intention without feeling clinical. Which is, if you’ve ever been in a gym that felt more like a hospital corridor, a harder brief than it sounds.

Asked which hotels he thinks have actually got it right, Miller nominates two that have almost nothing in common. Castello di Reschio in Umbria — a thousand-year-old castle on a family estate, furniture made on site, food grown on the land, spa rituals developed in-house — and Orient Express La Minerva in Rome, a 17th-century palazzo restored last year, original floors alongside contemporary joinery and hand-painted ceilings. “Different scales and settings,” he says, “but both treat the hotel as a balanced composition of architecture, craft, food and ritual.”

And then there’s Saga in New York, on which he adds : “the food, service, ambiance and design all work together to create an experience that feels modern and distinctly New York.” Three very different places, but the same underlying idea — that everything in a room is in conversation with everything else, and if that conversation breaks down anywhere, the guest feels it, even if they can’t say why. Whether luxury developers are ready to bring designers in early enough to have that conversation is a separate question, and Miller is too careful to claim the industry is already there. But he has, at minimum, stopped waiting for it to figure itself out on its own.

This article was originally published on Forbes.com