BDNY 2025: Four Insights Shaping Luxury Hospitality
Last weekend, Paper Laundry spent two days wandering the hallowed halls of BDNY — the conference for luxury hospitality design. We attended panels, and more importantly, had lots of conversations over cocktails, to find out what people in hospitality are really talking about right now. Below are the ideas that kept popping up throughout the weekend — and the insights we’re bringing back into our work.
1. Menu as Brand Narrative
Rishi Manoj Kumar and Zubair Mohajir (Exec Chefs at Mirra) talked about menu creation in a way that felt less like “trend forecasting” and more like personal storytelling. Their restaurants pull from Indian and Mexican traditions, not to fuse them in a gimmicky way, but to find the places where the techniques and ingredients actually align. It felt like a reminder that a menu has a point of view before anything else.
A few key takeaways:
When you’re crafting a narrative, clarity matters more than cleverness. Use the buzzwords strategically. Get people in the door first, then go deeper.
Hospitality groups don’t need every concept to look like siblings. What ties them together is the experience — how they treat people, what they stand for.
The strongest ideas usually show up in the food first, then ripple outward into the space, the brand, and the guest’s experience.
2. Spaces Need Strategic Vision
The panel on The Ann Savannah — Marriott Bonvoy’s new apartment-style hotel — pointed to a bigger shift happening across hospitality: “home” is no longer an aesthetic, it’s an emotional strategy.
Some of the best insights weren’t about furniture or finishes at all. They were about the early work:
Story and strategy have to come first. You can’t reverse-engineer emotional resonance after the furniture is chosen.
The best ‘home-like’ spaces are layered. Not one person’s genius — but architecture, interiors, brand, and operations all building toward the same emotional goal.
Early alignment matters more than ever. These apartment-style models only work when everyone is designing from the same story, not trying to retrofit it at the end.
And this was the surprising part: Across every panel — not just this one — people kept saying the same thing: brand has to lead. Strategy needs to show up before design, before space planning, before anything else.
3. Luxury Hospitality is Retiring the Word “Authentic”
Finally. Sometimes clients are so focused on creating an “authentic” experience, they miss out on the real place and culture in front of them.
A few themes came through:
F&B is driving hospitality forward. Restaurants and bars are now the heartbeat of many properties. Instead of chasing an “authentic” aesthetic, properties are rooting themselves in the local food scene — letting chefs, ingredients, and rituals shape the experience in a way that feels genuinely connected to the place.
Variation keeps a project alive. Authenticity tends to flatten everything into one neat story. Honoring a place requires contrast, layers, and moments that don’t match on purpose because culture itself is not linear.
Curious teams do better work. The word “authentic” often becomes a shortcut — a way to justify decisions instead of exploring them. Curiosity forces a team to actually understand a place. Collaboration keeps them honest.
And that’s exactly what we’re seeing with our clients: the best work happens when teams drop the urge to make something “authentic” and instead spend time figuring out what feels true to this location, this community, this moment.
It leads to richer concepts, more surprising ideas, and spaces that feel lived-in rather than themed.
4. Match Your Chef’s Energy
We attended a panel on experiential dining that didn’t go exactly where expected — 10 minutes talking about the Rainforest Cafe was a detour we didn’t see coming — but there were a few ideas we just couldn’t shake: How do you bring the energy of the chef to the table itself? What does that energy actually feel like for a guest?
It’s something we’re thinking about with upcoming projects for award-winning clients. Their chefs have very distinct creative signatures — translating that into brand language, or even interior cues, feels like a challenge worth taking seriously.
A Weekend Worth Remembering
Across all the talks, one thing felt consistent: Hospitality brands are getting more intentional about the stories they tell — and more aware of how those stories live across food, space, and experience. Nothing is one-dimensional anymore. Guests notice the layers. Teams want to build spaces that hold meaning. And the work is better when strategy leads, not follows.
If you want to talk about where your own hospitality brand could go from here, we’d love to help shape that next chapter.