LAS VEGAS — Several hundred hospitality suppliers and designers gathered at the Mandalay Bay Resort & Casino in early May for the annual HD Expo, a trade show dedicated to hotel design. Several new products and partnerships were on display at the trade show floor.
Dedon
Furniture company Dedon has revived its Seashell collection, adding the Seashell Grand wing chair to the existing Nuo Side chair, armchair and lounge chair. The updated Seashell range now uses Dedon's EcoCycle Fiber that is 90 percent derived from sugarcane. At the company’s booth, the line was paired with Dedon’s Porcini high-pressure laminate tabletop line, which now is available in Black Pepper and Lipari as well as Black, Taupe, Nori and Terra in the original ceramic. The new material, Dedon Marketing Manager Nicole Ciminera said, improves the tabletop’s durability.
Gloster
The Gloster booth displayed the company’s new Fern Lounge Chair by Sebastian Herkner, which will be available next year.
While the line currently has a teak base, Marketing & Textile Manager Teresa Newton noted that the chair will have an aluminum base for hospitality settings, which makes it more “tactical.” The line includes a low-back lounge chair and a high-back wing chair, both available in two colorways.
Koroseal
The Koroseal booth celebrated the company’s nearly 20 years of collaboration with Arte. The Koroseal design team works with Arte to translate their most popular patterns into vinyl interpretations. The partners’ Under the Sycamore Tree wallcovering option dominated the booth with colored wood patterns that were crafted by hand into an image.
Traci Kloos, vice president design and development at Koroseal, showed off some of the company’s newest products. Lucent Bloom is one of the newest additions to the Specialty Wallcovering product portfolio—a design with transparent petals on a foil background. “It's on this beautiful foil substrate, and then it's digitally printed on top,” she explained. “The line is available in five different colors, bigger scale, you know, much more dynamic and vibrant.”
The company also has partnered with wood-paneling company American Architectural Products Group to develop a line of modular wall panel systems that provide acoustical control. “Really, we're more of a solution provider,” Kloos said. “It's not just wallcoverings anymore.”
Reid Witlin Textiles
Reid Witlin launched a new textile collection at its booth. Succession is specifically designed for the hospitality market, Sales Manager & Creative Director Jordan Yasgoor said, noting the qualities that make the material suitable for hotels. The textiles are designed to resist abrasions and fire repel liquids. “It's really a resilient collection,” she noted.
The patterns are curated to be either used on their own or in combination with other patterns and textiles. “They're very bold and warm and friendly,” she said. “I wanted it to feel like you're at home wherever you are. … If you were to come across any of these patterns in someone's home and then you walked into a guestroom and you felt that same feeling of being comfortable—that's the goal.”
Tuuci
The Tuuci booth was dominated by the Ocean Master MAX Bolero: Ombré Blossom Parasol, a parasol with a domed silhouette decorated with 336 hand-tufted outdoor-rated blossoms and scalloped interior detailing. “Then, on the inside, we have this double-tulip effect,” Mausi McDaniel, chief marketing officer at Tuuci, said in the booth. The unit, she said, can be customized with different colors. During the conference, the parasol won the Eric Engstrom Best of Competition Award.
Tuuci’s products, McDaniel said, are all manufactured to endure outdoor elements. “The outdoor-rated fabric [is] going to be UV resistant.” Using aluminum instead of wood means it will not weather over time or develop a patina and hotel staff will not need to oil the unit. “You really have very, very low maintenance. The product looks like wood, it gets the warmth of wood, the feel of wood, but it's actually aluminum,” McDaniel said. “It's going to last, really, almost forever.”
Wolf-Gordon
Surface design company Wolf-Gordon launched Binya | Comya, a collection of digitally printed, PVC-free wallcoverings that explore issues of identity and legacy through the traditions of the Gullah Geechee people of the United States’ Lowcountry region.
The collection turns photographs, original paintings and three-dimensional objects—sweetgrass baskets, cast nets, ironwork—into two dimensional mural images and patterns that can be applied on interior walls.
This exhibition is the third in a series of such explorations initiated by Marybeth Shaw, Wolf-Gordon chief creative officer and curator, that directs attention toward works of art, design and cultural heritage in their particular social context.
This article was originally published in the June edition of Hotel Management magazine. Subscribe here.