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Few designers would argue that the buzz surrounding Caviar Kaspia Los Angeles comes down to its banquets, or that il Buco earned its place as a New York institution because of its table settings. The same is true of the bohemian spirit of the Hotel Chelsea or the lush rooftop at The Studio Museum in Harlem. What endures isn’t a single chair, light fixture, or work of art. It’s the atmosphere—built through layers of light, movement, materiality, ritual, and memory that visitors rarely notice individually but experience all at once.
“I always look at the overall design process as creating atmosphere, which to me is different from just visual composition,” explains Tiffany Howell, the designer behind Caviar Kaspia LA and founder of Night Palm Studio. “I’m basically creating conditions for people to feel something.”
Howell considers lighting one of the most important and underutilized layers. “I ask myself, ‘What is this room going to feel like at 7 a.m., 4 p.m., and midnight?’ I get to know how the sunlight will pass through it—the way it bounces off a furniture piece that is positioned at a window, even how it will touch the client’s skin. Bad lighting can completely make people feel subconsciously unwell,” she says.
For Will Meyer, who has spent more than two decades in hospitality design shaping experiences through AD PRO Directory firm, Meyer Davis, the strongest destinations begin by listening. “What excites me most about hospitality and cultural projects is the opportunity to build on an existing story,” he says. “Every place has its own history, traditions, and rhythms, and those always become the starting point for our design.”
That philosophy guided Meyer Davis’s work on Four Seasons Resort Red Sea. “There, we looked beyond the architecture to the experience of the landscape itself. The dunes, coral reefs, mangrove forests, and shoreline informed every aspect of the interiors.” The aim isn’t to layer decorative references onto a project, Meyer says, it is to create spaces that are inseparable from their setting. “Rather than imposing a design language, our goal was to create one that could only belong to this place. The strongest projects are those that grow from the character, culture, and spirit of their surroundings.”
Sometimes it’s the smaller rituals that make a destination immediately welcoming. At the Jenni Kayne Farmhouse in New York's Hudson Valley, Kayne thinks about the small gestures that immediately shift a guest’s state of mind. “I love lighting the fireplace and opening the windows or doors when I’m hosting,” she says. “The combination of warmth and fresh air creates a feeling that’s difficult to replicate any other way. I find it instantly puts people at ease.”
Museums present a different challenge. Instead of encouraging guests to linger over dinner or settle into a hotel room, they ask visitors to slow down, observe, and move through space with intention. For landscape architect Sara Zewde, whose AD100 firm Studio Zewde designed the rooftop at the Studio Museum in Harlem, that means creating a different kind of environment—one that reconnects visitors with both the landscape and the community.
“Museums ask visitors to engage deeply, but also impose a certain discipline,” she says. “You typically don’t touch the art, you speak more quietly, you move carefully, and galleries as spaces are often deliberately restrained.” The rooftop offers a counterpoint—a setting where visitors can reconnect with their senses through elements like shade, the breeze, and seasonal plantings. Here, movement is carefully choreographed. “How people move through the landscape is part of how they experience the institution itself,” Zewde says. “We designed the rooftop to support that mission by creating spaces for gathering, pause, conversation, and reflection.”
Once those pathways have been defined, materials reinforce the experience. For decades, New Yorkers have returned to il Buco as much for its ambiance as its menu. “Every surface across all our locations has a story, and together these elements build upon each other,” says founder Donna Lennard. The worn materials, candlelight, and collected interiors have become inseparable from the restaurant’s identity. Wood absorbs sound differently than stone. Linen filters daylight differently than velvet. Rough plaster reflects light differently than polished marble. Beyond the carefully curated music, Lennard says, “the rhythm of the kitchen, the low register of a full dining room, and the particular acoustics of a space built from wood, stone, and age” become part of the restaurant’s character. “It is the tension and conversation between all of it that makes every room in the il Buco family feel complete and wonderfully layered,” she says.
But the true test of a place’s identity may be whether it survives change. Few places illustrate that better than the Hotel Chelsea, where Studio Sio was tasked with reimagining a New York landmark without losing the qualities that made it an institution in the first place. “The Chelsea was never famous just for its architecture,” says Shanta Trusewich, founder and principal designer of Studio Sio, who lived at the hotel throughout the renovation. “It’s the people—the art, music, and performances created inside it.”
That understanding informed everything from preserving the hotel’s remarkable art collection—much of it acquired when longtime residents traded paintings for rent—to layering antique and vintage furnishings with contemporary pieces for rooms that aren’t overly polished or uniform. “This is not a space that was built in a day,” Trusewich says. “And it shouldn’t feel like one.”
Even the hotel’s acoustics became part of that philosophy. “The most invisible layer was acoustic,” she says. “In what could historically be called a party hotel, we spent a great deal of time with sound engineers ensuring you can have a great time downstairs and still get a great night’s sleep upstairs.”
These are the kinds of design decisions visitors rarely notice, but almost always feel. Zewde explains: “Rather than designing an image, we’re designing a relationship between people and a place." It’s that relationship—not any single object or detail—that allows cultural icons to endure.
