Room for Luxury and Energy Efficiency: Hospitality Goes Green

Smaller footprints, energy consciousness, healthy interiors and flexible room configurations provide sustainable solutions for greening the hospitality industry.
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Sponsored by Henry Company, Modernus Doors + Office and THE SLIDING DOOR COMPANY®
Celeste Allen Novak AIA, LEED AP

Flexibility and Universal Design

Most hotel chains need to refresh the design of their interior architecture on a regular basis in order to reduce the churn rate of their clientele. Customers will return to a hotel based on its branding and as it stays in fashion with current trends. Planning for the constant turn over of interior architecture requires a flexible design strategy for room configurations and one that minimizes construction waste. New sliding doors can be entire walls that are designed to fill the openings from floor to ceiling creating the option for a multitude of room configurations. They can be hung from ceilings for easier and faster installations and renovations.

Space-saving sliding doors reminiscent of Japanese screens can be specified with low VOC finishes.

Photo courtesy of The Sliding Door Company

Sliding doors can be mounted in tandem or stacked to slide into a pocket or align with other panels. Manufacturers are also providing sliding door walls and windows that can be plugged into almost any opening or room configuration with a minimum of changes to existing openings.

Hospitality designers are incorporating sliding doors in numerous finishes and configurations to create flexible space in hotel lobbies, conference rooms and spas as well as for hospitality suites. Derived from the Japanese practice of sliding screens to divide rooms, sliding door engineering is far different from the sliding closet doors so popular in the fifties. New hardware options include doors that are pre-hung on overhead tracks with rollers and locking systems that assure that they stay on track. These systems maximize the speed and flexibility of installations for new and renovated hotel properties.

According to Barbara Knecht, the director of The Institute of Human Centered Design, accessibility is the law but universal design is a movement.6 Universal design principles and practices are important to an industry that houses everyone, from children to seniors and those with differing abilities. According to the ADA Standards for Accessible Design, accessible doors can be either sliding or swinging. A sliding door requires similar approach distances from the front or side as does any other door opening but by using a sliding door, the designer does not have to accommodate the area of the door swing. Swinging doors need more clear floor area than sliding doors. For example, in a bathroom, more clearance to fixtures and furniture is required to accommodate the swing of a door.

ADA Requirements

Accessible doors must have a minimum of a clear opening width of 32-in., measured from the face of the door opened to 90 degrees to the surface of the latch sided door stop. If no latch side doorstop exists, then measure to the latch side jamb surface.

  • Doorways deeper than 24-in. must have a minimum clear opening width of 36-in.
  • When an existing building is altered, the clear opening may be reduced 5/8-in., if it is structurally or technically impossible to provided a minimum 32-in. clear opening.
    • Doorway approaches for manual sliding doors are 48-in. for a front approach and 42-in. for a side approach.
    • Adjacent flooring shall have smooth surfaces. Horizontal or vertical joints in these surfaces shall be within 1/16-in. (1.6 mm) of the same plane as the other. Cavities created by added kick plates shall be capped.
    • Door thresholds should be no taller than 1/2-in. tall.7

 

Roofing: Green Roofs-Cool Roofs

Returning to ways in which hotels can save energy by exterior applications, providing views to the outdoors is helpful as long as the view is not one of mechanical equipment on the top of the adjacent roof below. Planted roofs can make once undesirable room choices some of the best views in the hotel complex. Green roofs protect water quality, save energy by added insulation, and provide a visual demonstration of a commitment to nature.

For stormwater management a new green roof system captures a portion of water in small plastic cups as part of the roof vegetation system. The water that is not used as part of the roof irrigation system is collected into cisterns and can be redirected back onto the roof or onto other landscape areas that need irrigation. The USGBC "Practical Strategies in Green Building- Hotels"8 lists the installation of a green roof as an example of a means to improve stormwater runoff and to reduce energy use as a credit for Heat Island Reduction-Roof: SSc7.2.

Cool roofs provide protection from solar heat and radiation and can prevent early degradation of roof surfaces. Conference centers and banquet halls have some of the largest roof surfaces in a hotel's portfolio. Like green roofs, cool roofs can add to the life expectancy of these roof surfaces. Highly reflective coatings can be chosen to reduce heat gain particularly in urban heat islands. These coatings can be chosen in a variety of colors - white, aluminum or numerous pigment choices. There are also products that can be applied like paint to attic interior surfaces that can also provide cool roof protection.

 

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Originally published in Architectural Record
Originally published in May 2011

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Academies
Room for Luxury and Energy Efficiency: Hospitality Goes Green
Buyer's Guide
CUSTOM-BUILT SLIDING DOORS
Modernus Sliding Doors are custom built and feature a top-hung track system with shock-absorbing sliding hardware. Doors can be produced in recycled aluminum, stainless steel and wood. Doors do not require a floor track and sliding hardware is 100% concealed within the track system—making for the most minimal system available.
Modernus Doors + Office
www.modernus.com/products/sliding
WALL SLIDE / BARN DOORS AND ROOM DIVIDERS
Wall Slide (Barn) Doors, as well as Room Dividers, are a sliding door system separating one part of a room from another using a proprietary panel-clamp smooth-glide system. Design is customizable with choice of finishes and with highly safe glass types (tempered or laminated).
THE SLIDING DOOR COMPANY®
www.slidingdoorco.com
FULLY ADHERED POLYMERIC WRAP SYSTEM
BlueskinVP™ picks up where traditional polymeric wraps leave off. This fully adhered system functions not only as a water-resistive barrier but also as an air barrier, eliminating uncontrolled air leakage created by various mechanisms, such as stack effects, wind effects and mechanical air handling effects.
Henry Company
www.henry.com