Calling all interior designers!  Yes, you!  Put down that pretentious copy of Architectural Digest and listen!  In my first two months on the road, I have stayed in five hotels and two condos.  There are certain design & decorating flaws that are frighteningly common.  Each of them defies basic common sense.  If you are an interior designer, the next time you are in charge of designing a hotel, please take the time to convene a diverse (ages, heights and weights) panel of potential customers and ask them what they want.  I promise you, they will never say that they want a hotel room that only has one drawer.

Consider the following true-life situations:

  1. Nearly all of my recent hotel rooms have had only one towel hook in the bathroom.  Sometimes one will get lucky and it will be a two-pronged hook, allowing you to dry two wet towels at once.  However, there are many reasons why two people would use more than two towels.  Many women, for example, use one towel for their wet hair and one for their body.  If they are travelling with someone else, that means they will use at least three bath towels.  One bath towel will need to be thrown over the top of the door or some other random place because you have provided only one hook.
  2. Check out the bathroom photo in item #3 of this Freshome article.  There are no hooks anywhere that a guest could use to dry a wet towel.  In addition, to reach a clean towel, one reach must reach over the gaping chasm of the fancy soaking tub.  That works if you are exiting the tub, but what if you’re not?
  3. I admit that I am only five feet, one inch tall.  This puts me in the “below average” category.  The average American woman these days is five feet, five inches tall.  However, in what universe would anyone (even a taller person) want a towel bar that is 41” above the top of the toilet tank?  The (sole) towel bar in my current bathroom is a whopping five feet, six inches off the floor. (Yes, I actually used a measuring tape to confirm).  I am drying wet bath towels on hangers in the closet so I can use the towel bar over the toilet next to the sink for hand towels.  However, the absurd height requires that I reach over my head, take the hand towel off and bring it with me to the sink in order to wash my hands without dripping water all over creation. There is an empty wall that could have housed the bath towel bar so that the hand towel bar could have been mounted above the toilet at a logical height. But no, you chose absurdity instead. 
  4. The current space between the kitchen counter and the lowest shelf in the kitchen cabinets is 32 inches.  A toddler could actually stand on the kitchen counter and not bump his/her head on the underside of the cabinets!  The kitchen counter is also quite wide.  This means leaning forward to reach towards the cabinets (also awkward).  My husband was kind enough to move most of our plates and bowls to the lowest overhead shelf he could find so that I can reach them without asking for assistance.  Seriously?  How is this something that I should be expected to think about?!  I feel like a Hobbit vacationing on Themyscira. (Sorry for mixing fictional worlds)
  5. Our very beautiful suite in Charleston had a full living room, kitchen and bedroom.  There was no dresser or wardrobe.  In the closet, there was a piece of furniture that had one drawer.  I don’t know what one would call that.  Useless?  Stupid?  Anyway, I donated the single drawer to my husband, we shared the bar in the closet, and then I put the rest of my clothes in the lower kitchen cabinets.  Nope.  I’m not kidding.  My husband couldn’t believe it when he found what I promised him he would find. Choosing to put my clothes in the kitchen was no more absurd than designing a hotel suite intended for multiple guests with only one drawer, after all.
  6. Please stop cheaping out on the toilet seat lids!  I know you have a lot of units to furnish but this guest (and probably others) hates those chintzy toilet seats that flex when you put pressure on the closed lid.  Occasionally, I like to sit on the closed toilet lid to, say, trim my toenails or paint my nails.  I am not a size two, but my girth is not so considerable that I should fear cracking the toilet lid if I sit on it while closed.  In the future, please spring for the solid core lids.  You know, the kind they made in the old days before everything was manufactured overseas.

Designers, while I do not believe there is any hope for you, I will suggest that you consider researching the concept of intelligent design anyway.

Reader, I leave you with one final thought.  What do you call an interior designer who struggled in college and barely managed to graduate last in their class? 

Answer: Graduate.

Watch out.  They could be designing the interior of your next vacation accommodation.

Do you have any pet peeves about hotels that I may have missed?  Leave a note in the comments!