While a lot of boutique hotels don’t always have the abundance of the shrubbery and green fields (especially those in urban locations) around them, doing some landscaping could give a significant boost to their appeal. This will benefit you in so many different ways, from enhancing the experience of your guests and turning them into regulars, all the way up to being able to market your curb appeal.
Either way, for all of this to work, you need to learn how to do some effective landscaping with what you’ve got and here are five incredible landscaping ideas for a boutique hotel.
An oasis
One of the things that you need to do in your hotel’s backyard is to create an oasis of lush shrubbery and wildlife. Now, a lot of people fail to understand the very concept of oasis and fully grasp that it’s not about the water or the shrubbery, it’s about the beauty being concealed from the prying eye.
In other words, in order to make an oasis, you need to choose one beautiful, yet unlikely, element, and then do all to keep it away from the outside world. A fountain, a gazebo or a pond can fulfill this role and so can a pool. This choice should be made based on your finances, the available space of the hotel grounds and your own predisposition. Doing this DIY is definitely an interesting concept, yet, for a hotel, it’s much more efficient to entrust this to professional landscapers.
An impeccable lawn
Due to the fact that boutique hotels tend to be somewhat smaller in size, in order to preserve this compactness and make them appear larger (and more impressive), you’ll have to resort to optical illusions. One of the things you can do in order to achieve this is to play a bit with the field of vision and this starts with the lawn. Much can be done with the shape of the lawn, the size and the position of objects scattered across it, and the way in which these elements mutually interact.
Still, in order to keep your lawn impeccable, you have to do more than just design and plan it. You also need to maintain it, which means getting proper tools and putting someone in charge of this task. Due to the fact that this is incredibly important for a boutique hotel as a business, getting high-end lawn maintenance gear and garden accessories is more of an investment than it is a purchase.
Flowerbeds
It’s not that hard to imagine how important fresh flowers are to a hotel. What better way to further explore this idea than to plant your own flowerbeds? Some hotels take this even one step further and encourage their guests to take the tour and decide what they want to see in their room’s central vase the next morning. This may not seem like that much, however, this allows you to further customize, even personalize, the experience of your visitors. In the hotel industry, customization nowadays usually takes place in the digital environment. This traditional, analog approach to personalisation can be a surprise and especially effective.
Hanging gardens
In a densely packed urban area, you won’t have much to work with in terms of surroundings. Luckily, the symbiosis between architecture and landscaping traces all the way back to the ancient Mesopotamia and the Hanging Gardens of Semiramis. In order to at least partially emulate this notion, you can try making a rooftop garden, as well as utilizing your balconies and windows as much as you can. Vines are particularly effective here, seeing as how they help you use the walls of your hotel as a replacement for surrounding grounds. In this way, you use the vertical surface instead of a horizontal one.
Maze
Lastly, if you have a bit more space on your disposal, building a maze is definitely a solid idea worth exploring. Once again, it all depends on your skills and creativity, yet, contrary to a popular belief, a hedge maze doesn’t require that much space. In fact, if you have quite a bit of space, time and willpower on your hands, you may even try to combine this idea with the first item on this list and hide your oasis in the middle of the maze. This will further gamify the experience and add even more to the overall experience of any visitor.
Conclusion
Needless to say, the amount of money and effort needed for any of these projects depends on the magnitude of your ambitions. Moreover, the effect of the garden may not depend on its size or extravagance, due to the fact that some guests may appreciate the innovativeness of your efforts above anything else. Either way, this can become that one feature that sets your hotel apart from all your competitors; that one thing that keeps your guests coming back for more.
