Over the last 15-20 years, branded residences have become a familiar – even essential – element of luxury hotel development projects. As Laura Powell writes in this analytical feature “adding a residential element to hospitality projects makes it easier for developers to get financing and to produce an acceptable return on investment while simultaneously benefiting from a long-term revenue stream on the hotel side.”
Luxury Branding has been involved in numerous projects where the needs and wishes of the two distinct communities that occupy these mixed use developments have to be carefully balanced – residents (whether semi-permanent or permanent) and transient hotel guests.
Once of the first and most successful examples of this type of development was the first Armani Hotel and Residences located within the Burj Khalifa, the world’s tallest tower. Here, the hotel occupies the concourse level through to level 8 and levels 38 and 39, and offers sweeping views across the city and Arabian Gulf while the residences (one and two-bedroom luxury suites featuring the clean, elegantly understated lines of Armani/Casa home furnishings occupy floors 9-16 and were designed to reflect the personal tastes of Giorgio Armani himself. Luxury Branding was responsible for the conceptualisation, branding and marketing of both the hotel and the residences.
In her article ‘Why luxury consumer brands love the branded residence sector’, published on Hospitality Insights, Luxury Branding Founder Piers Schmidt explains to Laura Powell why brands are keen to lend their name to such real estate projects. He also warns that all that glisters may not be gold.
