The fourteenth edition of the design event for hotels and restaurants, held at IFEMA Madrid and which has had Grupo Roca as its global sponsor, has once again achieved record figures in terms of number of exhibitors, visiting professionals and business opportunities for hospitality projects identified among registered professionals.
SHOWROOM
interihotel presented a carefully designed exhibition space, made up of a total of 262 exhibiting brands, all dedicated to offering innovative solutions for hotel and restaurant design. Each brand has recreated its own interpretation of different hotel and restaurant environments (room, cafeteria, lobby…), turning the tour of the venue into an experience of pilot spaces for the hospitality sector.
For its part, the organization was responsible for the design of the common spaces, including the Suite, the Lounge, the Agora, the Atelier and the Interiors Living Lab spaces, among others. These areas have been dressed with product placements of the exhibiting brands, which has served to increase their visibility, in addition to providing professionals with areas for relaxation and networking with a lot of design.
TOP NOTCH CONFERENCES
184 speakers participated in this edition of the event, divided between conferences, debates and workshops. The conferences and round tables were moderated by Pilar Marcos, director of Diseño Interior magazine, Javier Peña, director of the Concéntrico Festival, Anatxu Zabalbeascoa, a journalist specializing in architecture for El País, and Cecilia Camacho, a strategic consultant specializing in communication and content creation. The Agora was the ideal setting for talks by featured speakers such us Javier Pérez (VP Hoteles), Ana Hernández & Christophe Penasse (Masquespacio), ÀngelaMontagud & Jordi Iranzo (Clap Studio), Hugo Bertrand (chic&basic), Erik Harley (Oficina Periferia), Anupama Kundoo (Anupama Kundoo Architects), Damien Perrot (Accor), João Albuquerque (BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group) or Karim Rashid (Karim Rashid Inc.), among many others.
The workshops in the Atelier were also a great success, with a practical orientation and dealing with interesting topics such as the role of materials (MIL Studios), bioarchitecture (Patricia Bustos Studio), the origin of ideas (Plantea Estudio) and the identity of projects (Casa Josephine) or the use of generative artificial intelligence tools (Burondo).
For the third consecutive year, the Lounge hosted several debates featuring key industry players representing hotel companies, the architecture, interior design and design professions, as well as interior design product brands. Some of the prominent participants were the association Mujeres en Hospitality, the IE School of Architecture and Design, the Istituto Europeo di Design (IED), the Universidad de Diseño, Innovación y Tecnología (UDIT) and the Re Think Tourism cluster, among others. On the other hand, the Lounge once again featured the “Diálogos” program, an already consolidated initiative of interihotel, through which professionals from studios and brands associated with AMBIT cluster (organizer of interihotel) discuss the different themes that have shaped this edition: design as a creator of memorable experiences, creative trends and concepts (BLOOM design), conscious design with a positive impact (IMPACT design) and disruptive design, innovation and technology (VISIONARY design).
INTERIHOTEL MAD24 AWARDS
This MAD24 edition of interihotel announced six award categories: sustainable product award for hotel and restaurant design, innovative product award for hotel and restaurant design, best stand design award at interihotel, best restaurant design award, best hotel design award and professional career award for hotel and restaurant design:
On the first day of the event, the jury chose Tarimatec’s Ecofiber Stone Composite as the winner of the sustainable product award. As for the innovative product, the award went to WoolWalls 3D Spacer, by Farrás Home. As for the award for best stand design, the company EGGER was the winner, highlighting its space designed by architect Miriam Barrios. The jury awarded the prize for best restaurant design to designer Noé Prades, for the restaurant Cielito Lindo, while the prize for best hotel design was awarded to Atelier du Pont, for the Hotel Son Blanc Farmhouse. Finally, the jury recognized Diego Gronda’s professional career as a relevant figure in the hotel and restaurant design sector, for his unquestionable merits and numerous projects developed throughout his career, at an international level.
INTERIORS LIVING LAB
The Interiors Living Lab, an open innovation space developed by AMBIT Cluster, prepared three disruptive and innovative spaces, exclusively for this edition: Concept Rooms Lab, Xperience Lab and Materials Lab.
On the one hand, in the Concept Rooms Lab, EL EQUIPO CREATIVO have devised and developed the concept of the Genius Loci Concept Restaurant, inspired by the palatial lounges of the CoolRooms hotel chain. It is a space that reproduces a moment so typical of the local culture such as sitting around the table to eat or drink and, above all, to socialize, recreated in a space reminiscent of classical forms, but at the same time contemporary in its layout and finishes. For its part, Zooco Estudio has been in charge of the conception of the Harmony Seeker Concept Lobby in response to the needs of the VP Hotels chain: a geometrically inspired and biophilic lobby that makes flexibility and polyvalence its hallmark. Thus, the studio has proposed a space very defined at a formal level, but diffuse in terms of its possibilities of use. These Concept Rooms have allowed us to imagine how hospitality spaces will be for new guests, through applied trends and solutions in products and materials created for different profiles.
The Xperience Lab, unprecedented to date, allowed visitors to experiment with disruptive digital technologies for application in interior design. The space was intervened with three installations showing the potential of three technologies: the Immersive Cube, an immersive and interactive installation based on video mapping technology and the projection of images, videos and animations, the Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF), which use Artificial Intelligence to generate three-dimensional models in architectonic visualization processes, and the Generative Artificial Intelligence, which offers visitors the possibility of controlling the artificial generation of interior design scenes by applying parameters from interihotel’s exhibiting brands.
Finally, the Materials Lab was presented as an exhibition of innovative materials, carefully selected by Matter Group for their sustainable attributes. The display has been installed in a hotel room designed by External Reference and 3D printed by LAMÁQUINA, which possesses natural catalysis and photocatalysis properties that contribute to the elimination of greenhouse gases.
INTERNATIONAL MISSION
In addition to face-to-face meetings and lunches, the activities of interihotel’s international mission included working groups and roundtable discussions moderated by David Cámara (Unex). This initiative has involved the participation of specifying studios and hotel groups from Mexico, the Caribbean, the United States, the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates. The program included more than 230 business meetings between guests and a group of brands associated with the AMBIT cluster, exhibitors at interihotel.
RESULTS
interihotel MAD24 “Supernova” closed its doors with the attendance of more than 10,000 interior design professionals, developers, managers and investors in the hospitality sector from 50 countries and the participation of 262 brands specializing in hotel and restaurant design.
More than 3,000 of the registered professionals have stated, as the main reason for their visit, the search for suppliers for a renovation project or new construction of a hotel or restaurant, which shows that, in addition to being a “boutique” event, interihotel generates business for the participating brands.
The program of activities for this 2024 edition included a total of 57 sessions of conferences, round tables and workshops, with the participation of more than 180 speakers, a record number both in terms of the number of sessions and the number of professionals, taking into account the high level of the speakers and topics.
With these figures, interihotel reaffirms itself as a benchmark event in Europe in the hotel and restaurant interior design industry.
