Elizabeth and I spend a lot of time in short term rentals. With her color, planning and design background and my marketing and communications background, we always have ideas for how rentals could be spruced up or tweaked to speak more to us, personally. We’re also savvy at understanding when we’re staying in a place that is targeting someone that’s not quite us. We’re not the target demographic, but we can see what they’re going for and fully respect that! And often still have ideas for things that could be improved to bring greater delight to their guests and bring greater profits to their business!
So we decided to play around a little bit. We decided to challenge ourselves with our suggestions from the last branding article and color article we wrote. Our goal was to create three different brands using the same bedroom and bed. I think we did alright!
We started with a professional business travel brand and the “Black and White with Warm Accents” color scheme that Elizabeth pulled together. A nice crisp white duvet cover, and a warm brown accent pillow are all the bed really needs. We added a dark throw blanket just in case it gets chilly. Two solid brown night stands on either side of the bed are simple and sparsely decorated with simple black and white artwork and a piece of local pottery. A lamp with an extra outlet is so convenient for plugging up your phone by the bed. It’s so nice not to have to look around for an outlet, and heaven forbid realize it’s across the room or inaccessible behind the bed. We chose a nice black and white map of our city for the artwork in this brand. We really like that because it brings in local flair and appeal, may be very interesting to the guests, and is right on point with color scheme.
The next brand we created was based on the romantic “Old Hollywood Glamour” color scheme. I can imagine this bedroom in a cozy one-bedroom rental in a sexy city center. Thus, we used my favorite photograph of 1943 New York City for the artwork. We used a subtle lavender/lilac duvet cover and that fun fuzzy white pillow. We brought in some navy tones with an additional throw pillow. For night stands, we swapped out the heavy brown nightstands for more delicate ones in silver and white. The lamps stayed the same this time around, but we brought in a sweet floral print for the nightstand artwork, and of course left the extra-plug-lamp right where it was!
Our last challenge was to turn Elizabeth’s bedroom into a room that children of all ages would enjoy! We were so inspired by the moodboard we created for the color article that we had to go with that Pink and Orange color scheme. The pink and orange duvet cover was a total score on PoshMark that was perfect for this project! We brought in a magenta throw pillow and a fun painting by a local artist. The adorable little orange lamps are perfect for a kids room – providing subtle lighting that could be left on all night if the kids desire. A few fun accents like the magic eight ball, the penguin statue, and the pink and orange artwork on the nightstand round everything out just right. I think what I love most about this design is that it really would delight a child or be cool enough for a teenager, all the while it’s not so obnoxious that an adult that found themselves sleeping in this room would be annoyed by overly childish decor.
This was a fun little experiment that I think went really well and brings the concepts of branding into practice in a more visual way. The same room can function very easily as three differently branded sleeping quarters, and you may even have all the right stuff to make it happen already! Or just need a few select additions to bring everything together. With a little bit of thought and creativity, your short term rental can sing the song of your target audience!