Residential Designers Look to Hotel Sector

NEW YORK CITY-Two design firms known for high-end apartment projects, Yoo and CetraRuddy, announced Thursday that they’re launching hospitality groups. The decision by Yoo to focus on the hotel and resort market came after winning an architectural competition to design a 110-room boutique resort hotel in Split, Croatia, an emerging vacation destination on the southern coast of the Adriatic Sea.

“It’s very similar in a way to the residential work that we’ve done,” John Hitchox, cofounder and chairman of Yoo, tells GlobeSt.com. “A hotel is frequently seen as extension of the home, in the sense that it is where one sleeps and rests.”

The Split project is expected to launch in 2011 on behalf of luxury-brand specialist the Spectator Group, according to a release. However, while it served as the catalyst for the new hotel group, it’s not the first hospitality venture from Yoo, a design-oriented property development company headquartered in New York and London and founded in 1999 by Hitchox and designer Philippe Starck.