Chris Lee - The Hospitality Designer

Chris Lee, founder and creative director of asylum, is helping hotels engage the local community and be more than just solely the domain of tourists.

- Low Shi Ping

Of late, Chris Lee has found that his job scope has expanded. The Founder and Creative Director of multi-disciplinary practice Asylum has been receiving more requests from hospitality clients to not only design interiors, but also re-imagine their property’s public spaces to engage the community in their cities.

“A lot of the big hotels are realising that they cannot function as they did in the last 50 years,” points out Lee, who is also a juror of the President*s Design Award 2020.

“They feel that people want experiences; they don’t want to go to a hotel that looks like any other hotel in any other city.”

Inadvertently, it has affected the way he designs hospitality projects, resulting in them now having to contain “highly programmable” spaces.

This means installing flexible lighting systems as well as tracking systems that allow for different types of room layouts to be formed by moving panels or doors around.