Circular interior design in hospitality: From aesthetics to esth-ethics 

We are all attracted to beautiful interiors of hotels and restaurants. But purely aesthetic interior design is no longer enough, preferably from now on a design should also be ethical, or circular. Circular design is by now familiar territory for Yannic Alidarso. The creative strategist has been working for the design and build agency Creneau International for eight years, where he made several designs in Belgian and Dutch hospitality sectors. Among others, he made lamps from shopping baskets for the company restaurant of Ahold Delhaize. He is currently working on his most circular design to date, with an impressive Building Circularity Index (BCI) of 69 per cent.

There has been a marked change in recent years. Whereas earlier the focus was on aesthetics in designs, now a design is also expected to be ethical. Alidarso notices that hospitality clients increasingly want to do business in a socially responsible way. This includes a smaller ecological footprint. But is such ethical design also attractive? Alidarso: "As a guest, you won't notice anything. We have developed our own method of integrating both aesthetics and ethics into our designs. The sophistication of the interior design remains AND every inch has a story. For instance, we installed a wooden table with an NFC tag at a client's house. Go over it with your phone and you get to see the exact location of where the tree stood in the city, to the nearest centimetre."  

Circular design is done in three steps, according to Alidarso. "The first step is: what can we reuse from the building? Think furniture, but also plaster walls that we disassemble and upcycle. The next step is: what can we get from the environment? In one project of ours, for example, this was the wooden floor of a bankrupt sports shop nearby. The process eventually yields beautiful and characterful elements. If steps one and two do not yield enough, we move on to step three: sustainable materials suppliers we are familiar with."

For a new project, Creneau International is working with Phi Factory, a party that maps raw material flows and links a circularity score to each material used. "Circular design means that not only the client, but also the designer has to think differently. For example, I may have to completely revise a zone because the material I had in mind is no longer there or because our score gets out of balance. Fortunately, clients understand that this is inherent in the process and have confidence that we will find a suitable alternative." 

For Alidarso, circular design began a few years ago with the assignment for Ahold Delhaize's new company restaurant. "We came up with a sustainability strategy, of which five ideas ended up being implemented." What he is most proud of? "The lamps that were once shopping baskets." 

Alidarso: "We were given access by Ahold Delhaize to their warehouses. There we saw piles of defective shopping baskets and I got the idea to upcycle them. We coordinated that whole process ourselves. From shredding to melting. This evolved into an almost fully circular design. According to Phi Factory, we are very close to the highest achievable BCI possible in today's market. That is currently at 75 per cent."

Whether everything should be ethical then? Alidarso: "Preferably. But we are certainly not more creamy than the Pope. We have clients who opt for 'the sky is the limit' where sustainability is not a priority, but also clients who opt for an interior that can be dismantled down to the screw. We encounter both issues, which is precisely what motivates us to make these two currents converge more and more. After all, circularity is a system we can apply to almost any project. That is why we motivate all our clients to opt for the most circular design possible."

Yannic Alidarso is a creative strategist/designer who has now worked for Creneau International for eight years. Within the company, he serves as a pioneer in the field of circular design. His workplace is at Strijp-S in Eindhoven. Since 2015, he has held the role of lead designer for renowned clients, including the Carlton Hotel Group, ING, Ahold Delhaize and Schiphol Airport.