2019’s Sleep & Eat indulged the European hospitality design community in its biggest ever exhibition. Over 160 carefully selected top brands presented their collections to designers from across the continent. 

Social FlexAbility, the theme of Sleep & Eat 2019, encouraged exhibitors and visitors to ‘be more social’ and immerse themselves in the guest mindset.

Social FlexAbility

Are we as consumers being provided with sufficient opportunities to interact face-to-face by the hospitality industry? In an increasingly digitally-connected world rich with customer insights and customer-centric design, can hospitality actually satisfy our primal social needs, or are designers lost in the noise of data? Sleep & Eat 2019 attempted to explore these very questions throughout its conference programming and showcase areas, seeking to examine the concept of ‘Social FlexAbility.’ 

A complex and layered topic to dissect, Sleep & Eat challenged exhibitors and conference-goers to respond to the humanity of guests. ‘In the future, it is the hospitality design industry that will…bring people back together, whatever the individual’s personal social preference,’ the event’s Director, Mark Gordon, said in his welcome.

Through an ambitious conference programme that brought influencers and industry experts from across the world together as well as practical experiments in hospitality design of the future, Gordon’s direction balanced the response to Social FlexAbility in theory and practice. Speakers included CEO Amar Lalvani of Standard International, Josh Wyatt of NeueHouse, and Jenna Campbell of Supper Magazine, who addressed Social FlexAbility as both a business case and an opportunity to delight 5 generations of consumers with tailored products and experiences crafted through design. 

An immersive series of Sleep & Eat set concept rooms brought the future of hospitality design to life at the exhibition. Manifesting the challenges and opportunities discussed in the conference programme, six design firms created engaging spaces in which guests could activate the hospitality experience of their choice. Each set engineered guest experiences that allowed for an individual to choose how to connect to one another in a digital age. 

NAME Architecture + Craster

Of the six international design firms selected to create the Sleep & Eat sets in 2019, Nathalie Rozencwajg’s concept was the sole to present the social restaurant space of the future. Rozencwajg, the creative behind Paris-based NAME Architecture, sought to ‘explore the power of design to personalise a social experience through a spatial one.’ NAME Architecture showcased a dining table of cyclopean architectural proportions and daring angle changes, carefully surrounding the dining surface with plush chairs from Ligne Roset set against a backdrop of Omexco wallpaper.

NAME’s table provided a continuous plane that defined the dining space. Through its complementing elliptical cutouts and resulting changes in distances between diners, the table mutated the social availability of each chair. Guests could thus activate the experience of their choice through selecting their preferred seat.

To manifest these different social dining experiences, NAME partnered with Craster to curate tabletop display. In presenting beautiful dining arrangements that mimic scenarios from a tete-a-tete in Paris’s 13eme to a formal banquet in the anonymity of a conference centre, Craster delivered luxurious culinary display items to bring NAME’s vision to life. 

Featuring the sleek and minimalist design of our Alto buffet range and the versatility of our Tilt buffet range, Craster emboldened not only the restaurant showcase but also demonstrated the power of intelligent design to curate our social spaces. 

Craster brings Line Table home

Craster’s mission has been to create beautiful, intelligently-designed products that enable the world’s finest restaurants, hotels, and conference and event centres to deliver exceptional experiences. Sleep & Eat’s 2019 theme of Social FlexAbility and the need to deliver functional products that enable spaces to respond to changing needs was the perfect opportunity for Craster to bring its innovative tables home to London. 

The Craster Line Table system is a unique folding conference table that provides a contemporary aesthetic to fit discreetly into any environment. Designed for efficient, intuitive setup and breakdown, Line offers the hospitality design industry the ergonomic and flexible solution to the prompt provided by Sleep & Eat. 

Coming in 2020, the beguiling Link Table System. Designed with the minimal aesthetic of Line and engineered for easy breakdown and setup, Link complements its sister system to provide a complete conference and events suite.