I rolled into my hotel Thursday night for Highpoint Market…the biggest home furnishings expo in the country…10 million square feet of DisneyWorld-for-designers. Designers and home furnishings retailers from all over the country come to market to see what’s new and learn all about the available products so we can help our clients make well informed choices.

The point is, twice a year the design community descends on this area of North Carolina on high alert.

Back to my hotel - I opted for a hotel as close and conveniently located as I could get and one that was more budget priced (or at least what passes for budget priced during the obscenely price inflated week of market (rates are 3X to 4X normal this week?!), but still serviceable in that it had a comfortable bed and was clean…or as clean as ANY hotel room can be…I try not to think about it too much!

Bonus points for the adjacent Waffle House. I’ve never been to a Waffle House and I am intrigued by anything that implies maple syrup will be served.

Anyway, I opened the door to my home-away-from-home for the week and flipped the light switches to find out I had rented in the blue light district. You know those light bulbs? The ones best reserved for interrogations and performing surgery? 5000K blue LED’s? Yes THOSE bulbs. I cannot live with those, not even temporarily.

Fortunately it was nearly time to go to bed when I arrived since I had been up since 2am, so they didn’t have to be on for long.

This hotel room reminded me, once again, that design matters. It affects your well being and state of mind. 5000K light bulbs that make an interrogation room out of a hotel room make me edgy and agitated. It is a wholly unnecessary choice. For the very same cost, the hotel could choose a more soothing temperature of light bulb and instantly have more contented guests. So easy.

I’m including this helpful chart from our post on how to select the right light bulbs

In this hotel room design choices were made…by someone. In the bathroom, I think that someone must have been color blind as not one combination of things makes any sense…the white fixtures, the not quite white floor, the murky ivory countertop, the gold textured wallpaper, and the grayish painted DIY mirror frame glued crookedly over the plate wall mirror all illuminated by ghastly overhead fluorescent lighting. It is quite the combo.

How hard would it have been to choose those same materials in better colors? I’ve been in some gas station rest rooms with better choices! And I don’t even need to reiterate that a different lighting choice would go a long ways toward helping generic, inexpensive materials feel much nicer.

The bedroom itself is cohesive, in a dated brown mod sort of way, with very tired carpeting installed sometime during the Nixon administration, but at least it all makes some sense. And props for the lamps having built-in outlets and a USB port even though the light bulbs are appalling. At least I didn’t have to crawl around on the carpeting looking for outlets!

I was chatting with my new friend Kelly Starks Schellert, luxury interior designer and founder of Ethos Design Collective, Friday at lunch about this and she shared a memory of a time spent in a hospital bed with her sick young daughter and looking up to see that the ceiling tiles contained embossed stars and moon…it gave her a moment of joy and peace in a difficult circumstance…it MATTERED that someone gave attention to those details when they designed the room.

Image courtesy of Kelly Starks Schellert

Design choices get made in every single space we inhabit and those choices can be made with care and intention OR sloppily by default and which it is affects the outcome tremendously. It costs little to nothing to make better choices that in turn create better experiences and a better life.