monterrey

Hotel Design: Comfort versus Boredom at Grupo Habita Hotels

Would you rather be entirely bored but very comfortable in a luxury hotel, or slightly less comfortable while having a unique hotel experience?

To me, this is the central question that Grupo Habita's hotels raise, and it's a good one.

Habita is a Mexico-based boutique hotel company owns nine properties in Mexico, from its namesake Habita in Mexico City, to the ultra-sceney Condesa df, also in Mexico City, to its latest hotel, Boca Chica, in Acapulco. Its Monterrey Hotel, Habita MTY won a 2010 *Wallpaper Design award, which you don't get for being fusty or forgettable.

None of these adjectives can be used in connection with Habita's properties. In an interview on Hotel Management Network, co-owners Carlos Couturier and Moises Micha said "Our mission is to impose a certain philosophy on society. We are not here only to create hotels, we are here to make people understand that creativity is good for society. We don't only build hotels. We build experiences."

I've stayed at Habita's property in Puebla, La Purificadora, and I also stayed at Condesa df, and I'm glad I read that interview, because I can now evaluate the properties on their own terms. Condesa is a fun, trendy neighborhood in D.F., and the hotel is just that -- the qualities that I'd count as strikes against in a traditional hotel -- smallish rooms, slightly noisy -- are actually part of the experience of being in that neighborhood. You don't go there for a retreat, you go there to be in the middle of things. As I mentioned in my review of La Purificadora, I thought that form sometimes trumped function, but I never once forgot that I was in a hotel that was making use of its space in a former water purification factory.

Gallery: Condesa DF and Boca Chica