Homes & Estates Florida Collection December 2016 | Page 10

The Luxur y Hotel
E xper ience

COMES
HOME
By Alyson Pitarre

If you have ever found yourself wishing that you could recreate the
sense of well-being you feel during a stay at the Four Seasons, you’re
not alone. A growing number of affluent homeowners are asking their
designers to make their homes look and feel more like their favorite
hotels, or asking their real estate agents to find a hotel-like property.
According to Todd-Avery Lenahan, renowned hospitality designer and
founder of TAL Studio, this is an increasingly popular trend.
“We see this across the spectrum of design — from architecture to
furniture and bedding,” he notes.
Architects, designers and developers across Florida continue to tout
the hospitality industry as a source of inspiration. Coastal areas such as
Naples and Miami, with their historically robust vacation home markets,
have especially been hotbeds for the hotel-to-home trend.
“High-end designers really focus on the way hotels translate design
into comfort for their sophisticated clientele,” says Lusia “Lou” Shafran
of Naples-based Pacifica Interior Design. “We’re looking for the same
answer: feeling comfortable and not enclosed in a space. We want to
give our clients that luxury of openness.”
Shafran’s firm did just that for the homeowners of a custom residence
overlooking the lake and fairways of the Quail West Golf and Country
Club in Naples, currently represented by Katheryn “Kathie” Soller of
Coldwell Banker Residential Real Estate in Naples. Working closely
with Stofft Cooney Architects, they created a 6,098-square-foot house
designed around a great room area that allows guests and family
members to socialize — “very much like a hotel lobby at the Four
Seasons.”
Architect Robert Herrmann agrees that luxury residential design is
moving in the direction of hospitality design, especially on the West
Coast of Florida, due to its proximity to the Caribbean and other
vacation locales.

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“People are looking for spaces that are soft and inviting — especially
if you are going to design a large home because of proportioning,” he
says.
For an Italianate waterfront estate he designed fronting the Intracoastal
Waterway in Largo (represented by Martha Thorn of Coldwell Banker
Residential Real Estate in Belleair Bluffs), Herrmann drew his inspiration
from the Mediterranean villas of Italy — an inspiration drawn from the
homeowners’ vacation experiences. He created formal entertaining
areas (not unlike a hotel), including a grand salon and a two-story
dining room that can seat 20 with an adjoining covered