This was my third stay at The Gibson in Dublin. I like this hotel. It has the right touch of creativity without being too contrived. Its staff are friendly without trying to be too cool. Its rooms are contemporary in design but functional and comfortable.
Themed around music – it’s located right next to the 3Arena, the main concert venue in Dublin – its signature mural is a giant painting of U2’s frontman Bono and guitarist The Edge. During my first stay in 2014, it was a work in creation – I saw the artist finnbar dac at work and had a conversation – and so somehow I feel a connection to it.
Finnba dac at work on the mural in 2014
It reminds me of what Town Hall Hotel & Apartment in Bethnal Green, East London, did when it opened six years ago. A former town hall bought by Singaporean hotelier Loh Lik Peng, known for his eye for picking up historic properties in up-and-coming neighbourhoods and converting them into boutique hotels, it invited over the course of its opening hundreds of local artists to create works of art around its spaces.
Persian Bear, by Debbie Lawson
And so when guests came, they almost always saw artists at work. “It’s not often people get to meet with artists and talk to them about what inspires them,” said manager Marie Baxter. She tells me the two most popular pieces are of the Persian Bear (above) and the Moose Head, created by artist Debbie Lawson.
Hotels such as Gibson and Town Hall are playing into this age of interactivity, where customers want to be part of the conversation. When you see something being created and you learn the story behind it, you form a bond with it.
It’s something I’ve personally seen at our WIT Conferences where each year, we bring in an artist to create a piece of “live” art over two days and our delegates get to buy it at a charity auction. Its value goes beyond the physical work.
I guess it’s like when they first thought of open kitchens where you could watch the food being prepared – I can’t wait for the next step in this evolution, where you can actually go cook with the chef but oh wait, they call these cooking classes now.
Art in hotels is not new. But they’re often displayed more like in art galleries – to be admired, rather than art that is shared. By the time you walk into a Shangri-La or a Pullman or One Farrer Hotel in Singapore (which has 700 pieces of commissioned art), they are framed, hung and perfect. Yours to look at, not to participate.
Hoteliers are trained to have an eye for detail and most strive for perfection but I wonder if in today’s world, it should be improvisaton over perfectionism.
The tech world prides itself on its “test and learn” culture –that is, you never wait for anything to be perfect before you launch it, you put it out there, and you learn as you go along.
But actually the late David Bowie caught on to this trend in 1999 at the beginning of the Internet age when he spoke about the “grey space”. “The idea that the piece of work is not finished until the audience comes to it and adds their own interpretation, and what the piece of art is about is the grey space in the middle. That grey space in the middle is what the 21st century is going to be all about.”
The more you allow your customers to be involved in the creation of your product and services, the more they feel a part of it and that’s when the first seeds of loyalty are planted.
I am never going to feel the same way I do about a piece of art, as beautiful as it is, hanging on the perfect whitewashed wall of a hotel as I do about the U2 mural at the Gibson.