How a Hospitality Design Studio Creates Culturally Resonant Spaces – In Conversation with NewTerritory

In the latest instalment of In Conversation with Luke Miles, Miles - former Head of Design at Virgin Atlantic and now Co-founder of NewTerritory - sits down with Jérôme Nelet, Associate Creative Director at the London-based design and brand experience studio.

With deep brand experience expertise across sectors including hospitality, automotive and aviation, NewTerritory is recognised as a leading hospitality design studio, automotive design studio and aviation design studio in London. The conversation explores how global brands can stay culturally grounded in an era of increasing aesthetic homogeneity.

In this conversation, Nelet shares his thoughts on the evolving role of cultural nuance in placemaking, the traps of global design uniformity and how emotionally resonant spaces are created by working with culture, not just around it.

LM: How is globalisation and the rise of digital culture reshaping cultural nuance in placemaking, particularly in aviation and automotive hospitality?

JN: Beyond the politics of globalisation and our increasingly digital culture, I see two key shifts transforming how we design for place.

Firstly, there’s the homogenisation of tools and platforms. Designers across the globe now rely on the same software, the same reference points, the same trends. This creates a feedback loop. While it enables global creativity, it also flattens distinction, resulting in spaces that are often polished, but emotionally neutral or placeless.

Secondly, there’s a tendency in marketing to simplify culture into something easily communicable. That might mean translating local texture into aesthetic shorthand, such as symbols, motifs and colours. But these are often surface level. They often fail to capture the rhythm or contradictions that define a real place.

As a French designer, I see this in how certain French air carriers craft their identity. Most are elegant, yes, but they can feel more like a concept than a place. The richness, the friction, the subtle edges of French culture often get smoothed out.

To resist this flattening, we need to treat cultural nuance not as a style guide, but as an ongoing conversation. That’s how we move from generic to grounded. From globally consistent to meaningfully local, which is something we prioritise across every project at our aviation brand experience studio London and automotive brand experience studio London.

LM: How can brands maintain a strong global identity while allowing space for local interpretation in their placemaking strategy? Where’s the line between consistency and cultural tone deafness?

JN: The tension between global identity, driven from head office, and the need for local context is one of the biggest design challenges today. The issue isn’t consistency itself, but how it’s enforced. Too often, brand guidelines become rigid. They prioritise alignment over emotional connection, and you end up with spaces that look right on paper but feel flat in person.

Think of Starbucks in Vietnam. The brand didn’t fail because people disliked coffee. It failed because it didn’t respect the deep, ritualistic culture of Vietnamese coffee. The space was too polished to feel local, and too formulaic to feel fresh. It sat in a cultural no-man’s-land.

To avoid that, we need brand systems that guide rather than dictate. It’s not about enforcing sameness; it’s about upholding a shared intention - how you want people to feel, while letting the expression flex based on local realities. True consistency isn’t repetition, it’s resonance.

LM: With social media shaping global design expectations, how do you avoid a 'cookie-cutter' approach and instead create emotionally resonant, culturally specific hospitality experiences?

JN: In the last seven years or so, social media has shifted how we perceive and value space. It rewards what’s instantly appealing and what photographs well. But design that lives for the scroll often dies in real life and brands should be conscious of this. It can be visually impressive, but emotionally hollow.

To counter that, we have to design with time in mind. Not just for the launch moment, but for what the space becomes and how it evolves over time. How it absorbs memory, mood and presence. The most resonant places are the ones that age with dignity and that tap into the emotional - they’re not just seen, they’re felt as they leave a lasting impression on us.

This is especially true in the automotive, aviation and hospitality industries, where the object, could be the seat, the cabin or the dashboard, can easily become the sole focus of the design language. The increasing trend to design a car’s dashboard around the tablet-style infotainment screen is a perfect example. But designing just the object misses the bigger picture. What matters is how that object fits within a broader cultural and emotional landscape. This is why we need placemaking in these spaces. Not just to make things functional or beautiful, but to create environments that reflect and grow with the people who move through them, how it will hold memory, create comfort and shape identity synonymous with the brand.

An aircraft lounge or car interior isn’t just a product. It’s a place where rituals form, habits emerge, emotions unfold and memories are made. If we only design for aesthetics, we miss that entirely. At NewTerritory, we see this not just through the lens of design, but through the lens of intelligence. That’s why we’re integrating insights from platforms like our brand intelligence platform, Aura, to inform how spaces should evolve with culture, not just trends.

Culturally specific design means allowing a place to carry the imprint of its people. Think of an airport that reflects the pace of its city. Or a hotel lobby that reflects both slow and fast-paced moments – facilitating new meetings and greets old habits. These aren’t theatrical backdrops, they’re lived-in environments and time is a material, through a day and over the years, we should be designing with more deliberately to allow the spaces to evolve and live and breathe.

LM: Where do brands most often go wrong when trying to deliver a consistent hospitality experience across cultures, and how should they rethink their design mindset?

JN: Brands often confuse consistency with control. They reuse what worked in one market without asking what’s meaningful in another. The result is often spaces that are recognisable, but emotionally distant.

The real issue is one of posture. Too many decisions are made remotely, using standardised personas and assumptions which make the design become a projection of what a brand thinks will work, rather than a collaborative effort factoring in cultural nuance.

At NewTerritory, we approach this differently. A good example is our recent work on the Aeroméxico Premier One Comfort Kit - a bespoke bedding experience designed exclusively for their Premier One passengers. This wasn’t just about creating something elegant or premium. It was about expressing the spirit of modern Mexico, a nation Aeroméxico has represented for 90 years.

We’re not a Mexican studio, but we didn’t want to just ‘borrow’ from Mexican aesthetics. We immersed ourselves in the culture, engaged with a renowned Mexican architect and exchanged with local voices to ask: what feels genuinely of this place today? How can this experience carry that identity subtly, in form, fabric and tone? The result was something grounded, not imposed. Something emotional, not performative.

This is what we mean when we say we design with culture, not around it. It’s not about translating your brand into a local dialect. It’s about building something that belongs, because it comes from listening.

LM: Looking ahead, how do you see cultural nuance in placemaking evolving over the next 5 to 10 years?

JN: Cultural nuance is only going to become more critical. As global aesthetics converge, what stands out won’t be what looks familiar, but what feels emotionally grounded.

In transport hospitality, people want more than just efficiency. They want recognition. Spaces that know where they are and who they’re for. That’s not just a technical challenge, it’s a human one.

Personally, I believe the future lies in embracing multiplicity. The most powerful experiences won’t be the most consistent, they’ll be the most alive. Built with contrast, tension and human intelligence.

Cultural meaning will be experienced much more deeply through local rituals so that guests feel cultural nuance more ‘actively’, not just as a backdrop.

For me, cultural nuance isn’t just a trend. It’s how design stays relevant in a world of sameness.

What emerged from my conversation with Jérôme is a powerful reminder that brands must avoid imposing a uniform design language across borders, it’s about cultivating emotional and cultural relevance in every context. As globalisation and digital culture accelerate sameness, the real value lies in the nuance, in systems that adapt, in environments that reflect where they are and who they serve.

At NewTerritory, whether we’re designing for a car, an aircraft cabin or a branded hospitality space, as a hospitality design studio we believe in moving beyond the object to consider the full lived experience. Cultural nuance isn’t a layer, it’s a foundational material. That’s how we design for resonance, not just recognition.

If you’re interested in the future of car and aviation design, make sure you check out our roundtable where we are joined by Bentley Motors and Delta Air Lines to discuss the Rise of the Experiential design. To learn more about NewTerritory’s work and speak to a member of the team about how they can help your brand contact us today.

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