Going to extremes: If LS:N Global made… a luxury experience

LS:N Global’s luxury experience would recognise that sustainability and immersive narratives are becoming base expectations across all stages of luxury, as seen in our Luxury Matrix 2014. It would also recognise that some luxury consumers are looking to extremes, seeking out discomfort and dystopian themes for intellectual and spiritual exploration as seen in The Polarity Paradox.

Our experience would begin with a hospitality venue that is also designed as a platform for culture and the arts, like Amsterdam’s new Volkshotel or the Swatch Art Peace Hotel in Shanghai. It would draw on the cues of immersive theatre as practised by Isabella Macpherson of multimedia production company Arts Co. Her company filled the Corinthia Hotel with characters that transformed it from a conventional luxury venue into a platform for storytelling, and staged a similar experience for the opening of the Hoxton Hotel in Holborn. Blending everyday experience with a fictional narrative, it would elevate luxury to the level of fantasy, as seen in our Neo-Tolkienism macrotrend.

Some guests will want to push the narrative to further extremes. In a nod to Turbulent Tourism, LS:N Global would also take guests into wild and extreme environments, like the Salt arts festival, which drew guests to a remote Arctic island in Norway. We would create unforgettable dining experiences like Wolvesmouth, which blends the artful and delicious with the grotesque and disturbing, or Cooking With Lava, in which culinary duo Bompass & Parr experimented with extreme techniques.

Recognising guests’ expectations of ethics and sustainability, our luxury experience would also share profits with the less fortunate in a transparent and meaningful way, following the model that has helped affordable shoe brand Toms become a favourite among luxurians. It might even allow guests to participate directly in social responsibility initiatives, as in Fly-and-Flop Philanthropy.

If LS:N Global made… 2014 is a series of reports reflecting the LS:N Global team’s pick of the best innovations of the year, and those that will be most relevant for consumers in the coming year.