Focus: Flat screen TVs
26 July 2010
Flat screen TVs have become a fixture in guest rooms in today’s luxury, and increasingly mid-level, hotels. Gone are the cumbersome, grey old television sets of yesteryear to be replaced instead by sleek, black, wall-adorning devices. And it’s not just in the guest room; flat screen TVs are making an appearance in all areas of the hotel from bathrooms to bars to lobbies.
The development of more advanced visual entertainment systems has had a huge influence on hospitality design for interior designers, offering numerous benefits but also posing a few challenges.
Advantages
On the plus side, flat screen TVs offer great flexibility and can even be considered a form of ‘floating technology,’ notes Leonard Lee, executive design director at interior design firm Wilson Associates.
“Flat screen TVs as opposed to the old CRT TV sets have made a tremendous impact since they no longer need to be sitting on a bulky console. Their minimized thickness has allowed us to think of flat screen TVs as a floating piece of technology that can actually be placed anywhere within the room,” he says.
“As such, even the design of furniture has followed suit and we do not need to provide heavy pieces or armoires to house the old TV sets. With their inherent flexibility we have the freedom to think of TVs as design features, which do not necessarily have to be directly centred across the bed any more.”
Lee cites as an example his work on the design for the Westin Hotel in Guangzhou, where he says he played with the “lower half” of the elevation with various uses of proportion and materials to create a contemporary design that was not affected by the TV’s placement.
“Flat screen TVs are no longer considered a luxury item, but rather a prerequisite amenity for any luxury property. This is significantly helped by their drastic drop in price in recent years,” he adds.
Federico Masin, F&B design director at interior design firm Hirsch Bedner Associates, agrees that flat screen TVs have revolutionized guest room design.
“The introduction of flat screens has given designers great flexibility and design opportunities unimaginable before,” he comments. “The most obvious advantage is given by the very limited thickness and weight of flat screens allowing us to install them at walls or even better at shallow niches (in this latter case hiding the unaesthetic cabling). You can easily imagine how this has helped in hotel design where typically the TV is installed in front of the bed at the narrowest point in most hotel rooms layouts.”
“On another level the advantage that this technology gives is its ‘discreteness’. Again the limited thickness allows us to hide the TV behind movable screens so we don’t force a guest uninterested in TV to stare at a mute piece of plastic. This is more and more often done in executive or presidential suites where the guests are not really interested in watching the news or at least a TV is not interesting enough to be the centre of their living room, but it still needs to be there if they want to watch it,” he continues.
The most advanced of these disguised TVs are the one installed behind two-way mirrors, he says, where the flat screens are visible only when they are on and are completely disguised behind the mirror when off. These are increasingly used at the mirrors of the executive washrooms vanities, he notes.
This is a technique providing great flexibility, notes Andre Fu, founder of interior design firm AFSO. “In our bathrooms, we have introduced a flat screen TV that is embedded behind a single-sided reflective mirror - this would not have been feasible with the traditional technology,” he comments.
Another plus noted by Masin is that flat screens can be combined to allow the formation of massive video walls that can be arranged to form one massive image or used separately showing different shows at the same time.
