Six Months Earlier: Isabelle Miaja on the Decisions That Shape a Hotel Before Anyone Draws a Room

Six months earlier

Ask Isabelle Miaja where hospitality projects go wrong and she does not begin with a material, a budget or a brand standard. She begins with a calendar.

"When an interior designer arrives too late, some of the most important decisions have already been made," she says. "The approach and arrival, the relationship with the landscape, circulation, ceiling heights, views, natural light, even the proportions of the spaces."

Her studio can solve a great deal through design. That is not the point. "Sometimes we are effectively correcting decisions that could have been avoided if we had all sat around the same table six months earlier."

It is a quiet sentence with an expensive implication. Across Asia, the appointment of design consultants still tends to run in sequence: architect first, interiors later, art and lighting later still, each discipline inheriting a set of constraints it had no part in setting. The result is a category of cost that never appears as a line item, because it is spent on correction rather than on creation.

Miaja has spent thirty years inside that sequence, first as a designer trained in Europe, then as the founder of a Singapore studio that now spans conceptual architecture, interiors, art consultancy, lighting and signage. Her argument is consistent and uncomfortable for the way the industry prices itself. The value of a design practice does not sit in the drawings it produces. It sits in the judgment it applies, and judgment is worth most at the beginning.

The studio and the record

MIAJA Design Group began in 1995 as IMA Interiors, a small residential practice in Singapore. It now works from Singapore and Paris for international hotel operators, with a portfolio that includes W Maldives, LUX North Male Atoll, JW Marriott Resort and Spa Maldives, So Sofitel Singapore, Pullman Central Park Jakarta, Sofitel Mumbai BKC and Lotte Hotel Busan.

Her own route was indirect. She designed homes in Beverly Hills and on Park Avenue before moving to Asia, where a European training in proportion and composition met a region that read space by other rules. Around fifteen years ago she began building art into projects rather than adding it at the end, and later founded Miaja Gallery and Miaja Art Collections. The firm is a family practice: her son runs operations and finance, her daughter works in design.

That combination matters to the argument. She is describing the economics of a design business from the position of someone who has had to run one, and describing craft procurement from the position of someone who has had to deliver it at the scale of three hundred guestrooms.

The context is not gentle. Owners across the region are compressing programs, tightening fees and asking for faster concepts, while software now produces presentation imagery in hours. Every one of those pressures acts on the production side of a practice. None of them acts on judgment.

The cost of arriving late

The case for early integration is usually made as a creative preference. Miaja makes it as a commercial one.

"A hotel is not simply a beautiful building containing beautiful rooms," she says. "There is an emotional sequence from the moment you approach the property to the moment you enter your room, and every discipline contributes to it." The guest, she points out, has no interest in the boundary between consultants. "The guest doesn't know where the architect's responsibility stops and mine begins. They experience a building as one journey."

A skeptic will read this as a designer asking for more territory, which is the oldest complaint in the profession. She closes that reading herself. "Not because the interior designer should dominate the architect, or vice versa, but because the project should dominate all of us."

The financial half of the argument is plainer. Integration at the start, she says, prevents redesign, variations and compromise later. "We sometimes spend a great deal of money correcting something that a conversation at the beginning could have solved."

For owners in fast building markets the arithmetic is the practical takeaway. The savings available from squeezing a consultant fee are visible and small. The savings available from sequencing the appointments differently are invisible and large.

Identity, not theming

The second argument concerns what a property is actually selling.

Miaja starts every project with an inventory of what already exists. "What is the land telling me? Where does the sun come from? Where is the wind? What grows here? What materials belong here? How do people traditionally make things?" Her position is that the site usually holds more usable material than a studio can invent.

She understands why owners resist. They want sophistication, and they fear that something too local will narrow the audience. She argues the opposite, on commercial grounds. "Today's traveler has seen everything. A beautiful international hotel that could be in Singapore, Dubai, London or the Maldives is no longer necessarily enough." A strong sense of place creates differentiation, she says, and differentiation carries value.

The distinction she draws next is the one the region most needs. "There is an important distinction between responding to a culture and decorating with it. I don't believe that taking a traditional motif, enlarging it and putting it on a wall suddenly makes a project authentic."

What she wants instead is the thinking underneath: materials, rituals, craftsmanship, landscape, food, stories, the way people gather. "Then we interpret those things rather than reproduce them."

And then the line that could serve as the brief for a decade of Asian hospitality design: "I don't want to design a hotel that has to tell you where you are by putting the culture on the wall. I want you to feel where you are. That, for me, is the difference between identity and theming."

Her reading of the regional guest supports it. There is no single Asian luxury traveler, she insists; Shanghai, Mumbai, Jakarta, Seoul and Singapore do not want the same experience. What has changed is confidence. "Thirty years ago, European luxury was often regarded as the reference. Today I don't think the sophisticated Asian traveler needs Europe to tell them what luxury looks like."

The consequence for design is a shift she describes as luxury becoming quieter: privacy, space, craftsmanship, natural materials, considered lighting, service that does not announce itself. "The challenge is no longer to impress people with how much has been spent. It is to create something they haven't already experienced somewhere else."

The things that cannot be photographed

The third argument is where her position becomes technical, and where it connects to the future of design fees.

"I have always been interested in what happens after the photograph has been taken," she says. A room can be extraordinary in an image and difficult to inhabit. "You can have the most beautiful marble in the world, but if the acoustics are terrible, the lighting is harsh or you cannot sleep properly, the guest will not remember the marble."

Light she treats as the variable that changes everything else, including the perception of time: the same room should not feel the same at eight in the morning and at ten at night. Acoustics she calls the invisible one. "Nobody checks out of a hotel saying, 'What wonderful acoustics.' But they certainly notice when they hear the lift, the corridor or the room next door." Scent requires restraint. "Luxury should never attack you when you walk through the door."

These are the first items cut when a budget tightens, precisely because they do not photograph. Her answer is the sentence most likely to be quoted back at her: "The eye may bring the guest into the room, but the other senses decide whether they want to stay."

Art follows the same logic and suffers the same fate. Too often, she says, the hotel is nearly finished, somebody notices an empty wall and asks what can go there. "For me, that is decoration. It isn't an art strategy." Brought in early, art can be commissioned for the architecture and the story, made with local artists, and belong to that property and nowhere else.

She refuses to overclaim the return. "I would never tell an asset manager that every dollar spent on art produces a precisely measurable return. That would be dishonest." What she claims instead is memory. Where two properties offer identical comfort and service, the one with a distinctive identity is likelier to be remembered.

Craft carries an obligation with it. "A small workshop cannot suddenly become a factory because a designer has specified its work for 300 guestrooms." If craft is to survive inside large projects, procurement has to be designed as carefully as the room: early prototypes, honest production capacity, agreed tolerances, phased deliveries.

On this she is blunt. "It is very easy to celebrate craftsmanship in a presentation. It is much harder to protect it through value engineering, procurement and construction." And afterward: credit the makers, pay them fairly, tell their stories, bring them back. "I don't want local craft to become raw material for an international designer's narrative while the person who actually made the work remains invisible."

What thirty years in Asia taught the business

Miaja is candid that building a design company is not the same skill as designing.

"When you begin a studio, you do everything," she says. "And because the company carries your name and reputation, there is a temptation to believe that you have to remain involved in everything. Eventually that becomes impossible." Founders become bottlenecks without noticing, she adds, and she was one. What replaced it was a different definition of the job. "My responsibility was no longer to make every decision myself. It was to create an environment in which good decisions could be made without me."

She now frames succession as institution building rather than as retirement. "If MIAJA can only exist while Isabelle Miaja is personally making every creative decision, then I haven't really built a practice. I have built a job around myself." Within a family firm she keeps creative authority and commercial authority deliberately separate, and considers a healthy tension between them an asset. What she wants the next generation to inherit is not her aesthetic, which "would eventually become a formula," but the values under it: curiosity about place, respect for culture and craft, storytelling, sensory experience, and the willingness to question what is expected.

Asia taught her the other half of the job. Trained in a European habit of open disagreement, she learned that harmony in a room can matter more than dissent. "A nod may mean, 'I hear you.' It may mean, 'I understand.' It doesn't necessarily mean, 'Let's proceed.'" The lesson cost her: teams mobilized on directions that had never truly been approved. Today she watches who does not speak, asks the same question several ways, and builds room for people to disagree without losing face. "Communication is not simply about hearing what somebody says. It is learning to hear what they may be reluctant to say."

Two returns

For the industry, her position amounts to a proposal about pricing. Fees have traditionally rewarded time: people, hours, drawings. If technology halves the hours, she asks, does the idea become worth half as much? "Producing an image and making a design decision are not the same thing." Software does not sit opposite an owner deciding where to invest, does not carry responsibility for whether something can be built, maintained or operated, and does not know whether a craftsman can deliver two hundred pieces at the quality shown in a rendering. "AI should give designers more time to think, not less reason to think."

For an owner, the returns are more immediate: fewer variations from decisions made in the wrong order, a property that differentiates on identity rather than on spend, guests who remember a place because their body remembers it, and a supply chain of local makers that gets stronger each time it is used rather than mined once and abandoned.

Her advice to younger designers in Ho Chi Minh City or Bangkok connects the two. Learn the numbers before the portfolio, because "a beautiful portfolio can hide a very unhealthy business." Then resist the reflex to look international. "The world does not need another studio trying to look like a studio in London, Paris or New York."

What deserves to remain

Asked which Asian city has changed most in her time, she answers without pause: Singapore, which became sophisticated about architecture, landscape, art and public space, and which taught her as much as she contributed to it. But progress asks for something back. She misses the older shophouses, the covered five foot walkways, the mature trees, the buildings that carry traces of different periods. "When everything becomes new, efficient and perfectly resolved, something less tangible can disappear."

It is the same instinct that makes her start a project by asking what is already on the site. "We have to become better at asking not only, 'What can we build here?' but also, 'What is already here that deserves to remain?' A city needs contemporary architecture. Of course it does. But it also needs memory."

That question, asked at the scale of a site, a city or a practice, is the one her thirty years keep returning to. It is also the question she will now be asking of other people's work. Miaja sits on the jury of the 2027 Asia Architecture and Design Awards, a vantage point that shows in one season what most practitioners see in a decade: which studios are interpreting a place, and which are decorating with it.

The verdicts of that season will be read out in Bangkok. In May 2027 the Asia Awards Organization convenes the Winners' Night of the 2027 Asia Architecture and Design Awards across the Aksra Theatre and the Pullman King Power Bangkok, an evening given to the projects that have moved Asian design forward in the current cycle. Studios whose work speaks the same language of intent can learn more at https://www.aadawards.com.