The promise of India’s hospitality industry has always been rooted in offering distinct experiences: stays that immerse travellers in the country’s extraordinary regional diversity, from the architectural traditions of its historic cities to the material cultures of its varied landscapes. Yet despite rapid expansion and growing design awareness, the reality on the ground tells a different story. Having worked with clients across different scales in India’s hospitality industry, I’ve watched many hotels follow a homogenised template that echoes a global style rather than a local or regional one. This disconnect between promise and delivery is an injustice to the rich social, cultural, and ecological diversity that India offers, and it’s worth examining what this homogenisation actually looks like.
Walking into Nowhere
Walk into a mid-market hotel in Jaipur, then another in Kochi, and an unsettling familiarity emerges. Polished Italian marble stretches across lobbies in both cities. Pendant lights from international catalogues hang above reception desks. Neutral palettes of beiges and greys dominate interiors that could sit just as comfortably in Dubai or Singapore. Regional identity, when it appears at all, arrives as decoration: a Madhubani-like painting in the corridor, a brass vessel repurposed as a planter, a jaali screen relegated to a feature wall. These gestures towards locality feel borrowed rather than embedded, ornamental rather than integral.
The architecture itself speaks no distinct language. Reinforced concrete frames and glass facades dominate, regardless of whether the property sits in the humid backwaters of Kerala or the arid plains of Rajasthan. Climate-responsive design principles that evolved over centuries—thick walls for thermal mass, courtyards for natural ventilation, locally appropriate materials—give way to mechanical systems and standardised solutions. The result is a visual and experiential monotony that extends from building envelope to bathroom fixtures, from furniture to finishes.
This pattern matters because it affects everyone: guests seeking authentic experiences, designers working to create meaningful spaces, and an industry competing in an increasingly discerning market. The gap between what hospitality promises and what it delivers has tangible consequences.
The scale of this challenge becomes clear when we examine the mid-market and economy segments. A large portion of India’s accommodation inventory, nearly 70%, is in the unbranded sector, which includes many family-owned establishments that fall under the economy and mid-market categories. The Federation of Hotel and Restaurant Associations of India (FHRAI) further highlights that the mid-scale segment is expanding at a rapid 13% CAGR, the fastest pace across the Indian hospitality industry.
Budget hotels, mid-scale hotels and regional chains have fewer resources at their disposal compared to larger players. Yet this is precisely where contextual design can have the greatest impact, both ecologically and financially. Understanding why this opportunity remains largely untapped requires looking at both the economic incentives driving standardisation, creation of brand standards (in Western geographies), and the structural barriers preventing alternative approaches.
Why Contextual Design Remains the Harder Choice
The roots of homogenisation lie in the realities of globalised finance and the frictionless movement of resources and ideas. International operators and investors understandably prioritise cost-efficiency and brand uniformity. Prefabrication and modular systems allow scalability but displace small-scale craft networks that once anchored local economies.
As a designer who has also studied the business of real estate, I understand this logic. Yet in pursuing efficiency, we risk losing something fundamental—the sense of place that makes hospitality both memorable and sustainable.
The policy framework compounds this challenge. India’s National Building Code (NBC 2016) still privileges reinforced concrete, steel, and fired brick. While the Bureau of Indian Standards recognises bamboo’s structural potential, other vernacular building materials, such as lime or earth, find no place in mainstream approval systems. Municipal bylaws track solar panels and rainwater harvesting, but never cultural responsiveness. These institutional constraints make working with traditional materials a prohibitive experience, and regional design identity thus becomes a second choice for many.
Yet the economic case for change is compelling. A contextual approach to hospitality creates value across multiple dimensions.
The Competitive Advantage of Contextual Hospitality Design
Such an approach rewards everyone involved in a sustainable and inclusive scheme. For instance, developers gain a differentiated product in a crowded market while local entrepreneurship gets a boost. Furthermore, this approach also cuts down logistical and carbon costs by reducing long-distance material sourcing.
It generates livelihood opportunities for local communities, especially artisans, quarry workers, and carpenters who belong to these communities, and to craft cooperatives formed by artisans. They are able to find a sustained source of income and also benefit from a wider recognition of their skills. Both domestic and international travellers, whose appetite for authenticity over standardised luxury is steadily growing, also benefit. The 2025 BCG Leisure Travel Report notes that over 70% of global travellers now prioritise unique cultural and natural experiences over amenities. Contextual design, thus, doubles up as not just heritage preservation but a competitive advantage that benefits the economy.
Several projects demonstrate how contextual design works in practice, translating regional building traditions into viable contemporary hospitality. Small but strategic adaptations can also help transform homogenised aesthetics and typologies into regionally grounded assets.
Take Sri Lanka’s Heritance Kandalama. Designed by Geoffrey Bawa in the early 1990s, the resort pioneered a unique design that addressed ecological sensitivity, cultural continuity, and economic performance. The project initially created widespread concern regarding its potentially adverse impact on the region’s fragile ecosystems and archaeological heritage. The developers responded with nuance, minimising site disturbance, using local materials, employing over 60 per cent of staff from surrounding villages, and implementing comprehensive waste- and water-management systems.
Since then, the property has regenerated a biodiverse landscape supporting more than 180 species of birds, and in 1999, it became the first hotel in Asia to receive Green Globe 21 certification. Kandalama proved that hospitality architecture that is true to its context can further the priorities of both business owners and communities alike.
At one of our own projects, the interior redesign of Charles Correa’s iconic Cidade de Goa, we brought in the local Indo-Portuguese flavour through multiple interventions by introducing Azulejos blue colours and patterns in the flooring and certain design elements, designing furniture to continue Goan-Portuguese traditions, and incorporating motifs inspired by the city’s flora and fauna across all upholstery. More importantly, we onboarded a local artist, Hitesh Pankar, to create a system of four custom motifs inspired by Goa’s natural landscape and cultural history, with each motif and specific overall colours assigned to a specific floor for clear identification.
The motifs—the Sun of Cidade, Lion of Cidade, Rooster, and Ixora flower—orient the guests while establishing a unique identity for each floor, an idea that strengthens Correa’s vision of a Portuguese hamlet with new spatial experiences at every corner. For every guest room, we designed a custom number plate with the corresponding motif, which is hand-painted onto baked ceramic tiles. This entirely hand-drawn and handmade process involved working exclusively with local Goan tile vendors to produce 91 number plates for the renovated rooms, supporting the local economy while infusing the space with a unique, contextual cultural and artisanal identity.
We Need to Incentivise Cultural Continuity
Scaling these approaches requires enabling policy environments that make contextual design financially competitive, not merely aspirational.
To accelerate such change, governments could activate policy levers: grant extra FSI/FAR for projects using at least 40–60% regionally sourced materials. Offer tax rebates or accelerated depreciation for the incremental cost of local construction. Mandate a minimum share of regional artisans (15–20%) in public-sector hospitality fit-outs. Such measures would make contextual design a financially competitive choice, not a sentimental one.
Policymakers can take inspiration from other countries, like Bhutan, where even new constructions must reference Dzong architectural principles; Japan, where “Preservation Districts for Groups of Traditional Buildings” safeguard the spatial character of entire neighbourhoods, or Singapore, where developers earn additional FAR for incorporating green façades.
Singapore offers additional FAR incentives to developments that integrate green building features (including façade greenery and vertical landscaping) under its Green Mark and Green Building Masterplan frameworks. These schemes grant developers up to 2–3% additional floor area for meeting advanced sustainability and productivity goals. Similarly, under the Green Mark Incentive Scheme for Existing Buildings 2.0, property owners receive financial grants for energy-efficient retrofits, proportionate to the carbon abatement achieved. These measures demonstrate how well-designed policy can make environmental performance a quantifiable and rewarding design driver.
Beyond policy, practical implementation requires acknowledging that contextual design is not about wholesale revival of the past, but intelligent synthesis of traditional knowledge with contemporary requirements.
Collaboration, Not Replication
While expressing local culture through contemporary architecture is a crucial aspect of contextual design, it is not a quest to replicate the past.
Many traditional methods depended on material and trade networks that no longer exist. Chettinad mansions used Burmese teak, and Gujarat‘s havelis sourced timber from maritime routes. In today’s cities, cement and steel are often cheaper and more accessible than clay or lime. Full-scale revival, therefore, might be unrealistic.
Here, personal experience has shown me that collaboration over replication is the key. For example, large hotel projects operate under industrial pressures, such as delivering 500 doors, beds, and tables in a month. Expecting craftspeople to meet those volumes is unreasonable. But they can participate at the design-development stage, lending their knowledge of proportion, joinery, and texture to guide industrial manufacturing. One then has to think of other ways to incorporate them; this can include hybrid modes where craftspeople create prototypes, which are then mass-manufactured.
In practice, contextuality lies in this kind of synthesis: where rammed earth can work alongside steel, rather than one ousting the other. The nature of this synthesis, again, has to be guided by local geographies, weather patterns, resource constraints, and workforce. This approach can revive entire ecosystems of livelihood that revolve around craft production by creating space for them within modern production timelines. It also spills into cultural rejuvenation, because it is one of the most tangible expressions of culture.
Indian hospitality design stands at a pivotal point. Changing weather patterns and resource scarcity are changing the way people live, eat, travel and move around, especially in densely populated countries like ours. Yet responsive, context-specific, and culturally sensitive design remains a work in progress. Biophilic and sustainable architectures are now imperatives, and the West increasingly looks to countries like India for architectural models that integrate climate sensibilities, craft, and community. As the BCG 2025 report reminds us, travellers spend more and return more where they encounter local distinctiveness. Context, therefore, is not nostalgia; it is brand equity.
For India’s hospitality industry, contextual design is both an ethical and economic bridge—linking sustainability with profitability, and scale with sensitivity. It is through design that speaks of its place, respects its ecology, and rewards everyone it touches that our hotels will truly thrive.
