Universal Design standard hotel room

Universal Design standard hotel room — IADA 2024 award

Universal Design standard hotel room received Silver Winner recognition at the International Architecture & Design Awards 2024 in Hospitality & Hotel Interior Design. Project status, design team and credits are listed alongside the presentation.

About the project

Do you know the most basic place in a hotel room for a disabled person? It's the bathroom, often the least suitable and riskiest room! Yet this is where every morning begins and every evening ends.

When a hotel is in the construction phase, regulatory standards stipulate that a certain number of rooms must be accessible to wheelchair users. However, most of the time, these rooms are designed without consideration for practicality or ergonomics, merely conforming to rules established by individuals unaffected by the challenges of disability. As a space designer and a person with a disability since birth, using a wheelchair and expert in Universal Design, I propose an innovative concept: a 25 m2 hotel bedroom that include a 4 m2 bathroom, fully accessible to everyone, including wheelchair users.

This revolutionary proposal, aimed at the hotel industry, represents a global advancement. Not only does it allow hotels to broaden their customers, but it also offers wheelchair users the freedom not to be confined to specific rooms for disabled persons, often associated with a gloomy and discriminatory atmosphere. Indeed, these rooms, especially the bathroom, do not adhere to the values and principles of Universal Design, where customer safety is often compromised despite mandatory standards in place.

The room, adheres to the seven principles of universal design: equity, flexibility, simplicity, intuitiveness, security, comfort and accessibility. Additionally, the bathroom can be easily and stylishly adapted to provide added safety for people with reduced mobility or even wheelchair users, thanks to the optional installation of a comfortable wall-mounted shower chair and grab bars. support near the toilets, at the suggestion of the hotelier or according to the customer's requests.

JYP Conseils

This 25 m2 hotel room, equipped with a bathroom designed to ensure a Universal Deisgn comfort for all, including wheelchairs user, is design in a space of only 4m2. This bathroom is equipped with a sink, a shower toilet and a walk-in shower, all of which can be fitted out in a few minutes without requiring work, just clipping to invisible plug to allow the installation of grab bars and a showerchair.