dc.description.abstract | The purpose of this thesis is to design an urban hotel located in Seoul, the
capital city of Korea. I used an existing hotel, named Kims, for this renovation
project. The existing hotel consists of forty-eight guest rooms, one bar, one
coffee shop, one restaurant and a lobby area. The coffee shop and the restaurant
are placed in the same room separated by three-foot high partitions. Compared to
other transient or residential hotels in Seoul and large cities in the United States.
this four-story hotel with forty-eight guest rooms can be designated as a small
hotel in scale. William S. Gray and Salvatore C. Liguon define hotels with less
than one hundred rooms as small hotels, with regard to their size in large cities.1
Because Seoul is one of the busiest cities in Asia, as well as in the world, the
owner of this hotel can expect not only an increase in the number of national
guests but also in guests from abroad. The expected customer groups are business
people from other areas in Korea, business people from abroad, and national and
international tourists. I believe that customers will be aware of and enjoy visiting
this small hotel if the hotel provides adequate advertising and a convenient and
beautiful environment with distinguished decorations. Therefore, renovation is
required to help improve the general qualities of the hotel and to provide
advantages that small hotels possess such as coziness. Guests can feel as if they are staying home. Furthermore, the business operation is less complicated than it
is in larger hotels.
I intend to provide high quality facilities with easy access and unique
decorations for guests and employees, and to use traditional Korean elements of
decoration for this project, because I judge that the most important factor that
could impress foreigners is to express my own culture to them through the design
of this hotel. In addition, this design concept could evoke an attachment to the
culture for natives. In the design process, I first referred to characteristics of
traditional Korean house forms and furniture. They supported the design of the
objects and the details that are used in this project. Then, I unified and abstracted
the characteristics so that these motives could be integrated into my own design.
Because one scope of this renovation is to internationalize this hotel, and the fact
that I designed this project as a result of studying in the United States. I consulted
Americans with Disabilities Act: law and regulations and Official Compilation of
Codes, Rules and Regulations NYCRR: New York Codes, Rules, and Regulations
for guidance.
I approached this interior renovation project by dividing it into two main
parts; space planning and design. For the space planning and circulation. I took a
hotel's functional organizations and principles of operation into consideration,
and as I mentioned earlier. I used traditional Korean design characteristics for
aesthetic motives. I intended, therefore, to make this hotel artistically wellorganized
by means of combining its unique visual aspects with practicality in
performing the basic role of hotels, such as management and operation. Thus, the
hotel can be a more valuable asset than it was before the renovation, both for the
owner as well as for expected customers. | en_US |