Stonebridge Marriott

• ~$45,000 saved on physical mockup
• VR guest room review before fit-out
• Design gaps found and fixed early

Why Real-Time 3D for Hotel Design Review

Mortenson created its Virtual Insights team, four people working out of Seattle and Minneapolis, to bring interactive visualization into its design and customer experience offering. The team delivers around twenty real-time 3D projects a year and works with clients including Stonebridge Marriott Hotels, AMLI, Bucknell University, Pennsylvania State University, Kaiser Permanente and the University of Washington Medical Center.

Repetition makes the room worth getting right

A hotel guest room is the single most repeated design decision on the project. Whatever is wrong with it is wrong three hundred times over, and whatever costs an extra amount per room is multiplied by the same number. That economics is exactly why owners have historically paid for physical mockups, and it is also why an interactive model that can be iterated dozens of times has an unusually high return in this building type.

Sightlines and feel, not dimensions

The questions that matter in a guest room are experiential: whether the desk blocks the route to the window, whether the bathroom entry feels cramped, what a guest sees first on opening the door. These are answered by standing in the space, which is what an at-scale interactive model provides and what a plan cannot.

One model, many audiences

Mortenson's experiences are built to output to HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Oculus Go and HoloLens as well as to 360 video, covering more than twenty-five devices and platforms. Hotel projects involve an owner, an operator, a brand standards team and an interior design consultant, often in different cities. Being able to send a 360 video to one group and put another in a headset, from the same source model, is what makes review across that spread practical.

A note on the tool listing

aec+tech lists Unity Reflect against this case study. Unity's published account describes experiences built by Mortenson's Virtual Insights team on the Unity engine; Unity Reflect is Unity's dedicated BIM-to-real-time product for AEC. The tool tag should be read as an association with the Unity real-time platform rather than as a documented Reflect deployment.

The mockup cost itself

Building a full-scale sample guest room is a significant line item on a hotel budget, and on this project the interior design team put the avoidable portion at roughly 45,000 US dollars.

Design gaps that only appear in three dimensions

Coordination gaps between the architectural, interiors, lighting and furniture packages tend to survive drawing review and only become obvious when someone stands in the room. On a repeated room type, discovering those gaps after the mockup means either accepting them or changing an order that has already been placed.

Stakeholders who do not read drawings

Hotel decisions are made jointly by the developer, the operator and the brand. Design Force's account of this project makes the point directly: the value was not only in saving mockup cost but in ensuring project stakeholders understood the impact of the decisions they made. Misunderstanding at that table is what produces late change orders.

Limited opportunity to iterate

Because a physical mockup can realistically be built once, the traditional process gives the team a single validation event rather than a design loop. The challenge was to create room for iteration without adding cost or programme.

The standard method in hospitality construction is the physical mockup room. A complete guest room, and sometimes a section of corridor, is built at full size, either off site or in a shell floor of the building, with real finishes, real fixtures, real lighting and real furniture. Owner, operator, brand representatives and the interior designer then walk through it and sign it off before the remaining rooms are built out.

The mockup is genuinely useful and this project did not eliminate it entirely, but it has three structural weaknesses. It is expensive, on the order of tens of thousands of dollars. It arrives late, once finishes have been specified and often ordered, which means any change it uncovers is a change to a decision already made. And because of the cost, only one version gets built, so it validates a design rather than helping to develop one.

Everything before the mockup was reviewed from drawings, finish boards and static renderings.

An estimated 45,000 dollars saved on the physical mockup

The published figure for this project is specific: Heather Mann, Senior Lead Interior Designer at Design Force, states that the team was able to save an estimated 45,000 US dollars on the physical mockup by using the virtual reality approach. That is a direct, hard cost removed from the project budget rather than a modelled or projected saving.

Iteration replaced validation

The more durable benefit is a change in what the review process is for. A physical mockup confirms a decision that has already been made. An interactive model lets the team run through many versions of the same room, so design changes are tested rather than merely approved. Design Force describes exactly this: the VR approach let them iterate over design changes and expose and address gaps in the design.

Shared understanding across the ownership group

Hotel projects fail commercially when the developer, operator and brand each sign off on a different mental picture of the same room. Putting all of them in the same at-scale space converts a document review into a shared experience, and the reported outcome was that stakeholders understood the impact of the decisions they made.

Scale effects in a repeated room type

Every improvement found in the model applies to every guest room in the building. On a hotel of a few hundred keys, a small per-room correction found before fit-out is worth substantially more than the same correction found in a one-off space, which is why hospitality is among the strongest cases for immersive design review.

Comparable results from the same team

Published outcomes elsewhere in Mortenson's Virtual Insights portfolio include more than 500,000 dollars saved at Bucknell University by catching a corridor and column problem before construction, and 375,000 dollars saved on locker assemblies at Kansas State University.

About the parties

Mortenson is a privately held United States top-20 builder, developer and provider of energy and engineering services. Its Virtual Insights team, based in Seattle and Minneapolis, produces roughly twenty real-time 3D projects a year. Stonebridge Companies is a Denver-based hotel owner, developer and management company with a large Marriott-branded portfolio. Design Force provided interior design on the project.

Delivery platforms

HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Oculus Go, HoloLens and 360 video, with output supported to more than twenty-five devices and platforms.

Related published context

Mortenson's Residence Inn by Marriott for Stonebridge Companies in downtown Seattle comprises 302 all-suite rooms over fifteen storeys at 924 Howell Street, with a 7,000 square foot conference centre, 1,300 square feet of retail and three levels of below-grade parking, completed in December 2017.