Abstract
In modern society which changes from quantity-seeking society to value-seeking one, people's various lifestyles have great effect on consumption patterns and work as an important factor in choosing hotels. The fact that design hotels, which provide unique experiences with differentiated and sensitive designs by reflecting various lifestyles, recently attract attention can be understood in the same context. As a matter of fact, design hotels recently serve as destinations as they become cultural and artistic icons which reflect customer lifestyles. Especially, the designs of lobby spaces in hotels play deciding role in customers' choices while representing the nature of hotels. In this respect, under the premise that the kinds of accumulated experiences are different depending on lifestyles and preferences for specific interior spaces are influenced by association mechanism formed by experiences, this study analyzed lobby spaces of design hotels which focus on specific lifestyles from the perspective of association mechanism based on experiences. As the method of analysis, this study classified the types of lifestyles and conducted case analysis to investigate what association mechanism works to enhance the preference of design hotels by types. Study classified lifestyles into experiential activity type, social meeting type, fashion-pursuing type and hideout-preferring type and analyzed cases of lobby designs in design hotels. The results of this case analysis are as follows; First, experiential activity type mainly utilized quasi-association and approach association through senses and social meeting type utilized quasi-association and memory association through emotions while fashion-pursuing type utilized quasi-association and presumption association through intuition and hideout-preferring type utilized quasi-association and approach association through thoughts. Second, it was found that most lobby designs are characterized by association mechanism in visual formative nature and that in temporal spatial nature working in complex way, and, through such process of association expansion, space stories are created. Stories of spaces created this way become unique identities of design hotels that provide new experiences for customers.