There's ample room for innovation at Marriott's new global headquarters: Travel Weekly

BETHESDA, Md. — There is a wall in Marriott International’s Design Lab, part of the company’s brand-new global headquarters here, emblazoned with the following Willy Wonka quote: “Invention, my dear friends, is 93% perspiration, 6% electricity, 4% evaporation, and 2% butterscotch ripple.”

Never mind that the sum of those numbers is 105%. It’s fitting inspiration for a space that Jeff Voris, Marriott’s senior vice president of global design strategies and a former Disney executive research and development Imagineer, characterizes as “an 8,400-square-foot playground.”

“[It’s a] place for creativity and ideation and exploration,” said Voris during a media tour of the Marriott HQ’s downtown campus in mid-August, shortly after its opening.  

The Design Lab’s main space — also known as Room27 in honor of the company’s founding in 1927 — is bright and open, giving Voris and his colleagues ample space to build out life-size room models and play with their size and proportions as well as tackle other hands-on experiments. 

In addition to developing better construction methods and sustainability strategies, the Design Lab team is looking at ways to better cater to bleisure travelers by making hotel rooms more “transformable,” Voris said.

“As a business traveler, historically, the proposition is you work in your bedroom and sleep in your office, and that’s maybe not as ideal as it could be,” he said, adding that the same solutions used to make rooms more flexible for bleisure guests could be applied to better accommodate families with children. 

“I don’t think the industry has historically done a great job of catering to families. So this is a tool we can use for that, as well.”

• Related: A glimpse of the future at Marriott’s new headquarters hotel

Next to Room27 is the building’s F+B Design Studio, which houses a state-of-the-art test kitchen and bar space (where it’s likely the butterscotch ripple, among other culinary delights, comes into play).

The Design Lab’s purview will also extend to a floor of the Marriott Bethesda Downtown at Marriott HQ hotel, connected to the headquarters by an outdoor plaza. Dubbed Floor57 in homage to the year Marriott opened its first hotel, the space will house room prototypes for 13 Marriott brands. Once Floor57 opens later this year, Marriott plans to invite actual guests to stay in the rooms and test out various operational and design innovations. 

Workplace and hospitality innovation

Getting this type of guest feedback would have been impossible at Marriott’s former headquarters, a northern Bethesda office park building that the company called home from 1979 until this year. 

There, Marriott’s lab was a dark, subterranean space with model rooms that lacked necessities for overnight stays, such as plumbing. 

Innovation, however, isn’t limited to the Design Lab. In a way, Marriott’s entire headquarters is a big experiment in how one of the world’s biggest hospitality companies will adapt to the new normal of hybrid work.

Like many companies, Marriott isn’t mandating a full return to the office. Instead, it has extended a flexible work policy, allowing corporate staff to come in when they choose. As a result, the headquarters’ layout is far from traditional. 

Rather than have dedicated desks, employees can reserve workstations in various “neighborhoods,” with each neighborhood representing a different department. For private meetings or calls, there are glass-walled conference areas and small, soundproof rooms available.

The number of workstations planned for the site was reduced once it became clear that remote working was likely to remain well beyond the pandemic and that people would use the office differently.

“We took about 25% of our workstations and instead replaced that with more flexible seating,” said David Marriott, the company’s chairman of the board. “[We did that] knowing that people, when they come to the office, may be here less to do heads-down work and more for meetings.”

The new building is also expected to function as an effective recruiting tool. In addition to modern and flexible workspaces, the headquarters offers amenities like a health and fitness center complete with Peloton bikes; a wellness suite with meditation rooms, massage chairs, treadmill desks and a lactation room; and an on-site childcare center operated by Bright Horizons.

“We eliminated a significant percentage of our workforce in the early days of the pandemic, so we’re actually hiring and trying to build that workforce back up,” said Marriott CEO Tony Capuano. “We think this building and this work environment will be a significant competitive advantage.”

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