I have been to hotels over south america and europe. I have noticed that at leas on more modern hotels the rooms look really similar - no windows on the bathroom, which always smells the same and the bedroom in front. I mean, it is nice for the bedroom to have more windows, but… It seems that even in hospitals the rooms look like that. Who defined that a hotel room has this specific shape?
What is the cheapest way to make an efficient room viz. shower/bath, toilet, bed, TV/Dresser, nightstand, writing desk to hold a lamp?
My guess is there is pretty much one answer. Tile in the bathroom. Cheap-ass carpet. Combination comforter/sandpaper. Etc.
Yeah, that would be my guess - the drive to come up with the most efficient / cost effective design. Consider it convergent evolution in action.
I’d also expect that having the bathrooms on the interior requires less plumbing to make everything work right. If the side of the rooms the bathrooms are on alternates between rooms on the same side of the hall, some piping can be shared between the two bathrooms.
Also, bathrooms on interior walls are less prone to freezing pipes / less waste in getting hot water to the rooms.
I loved the room in my most recent hotel stay and yes, it was a very standard room. Standard bathroom with standard issue tile floors, white towels, and standard fixtures. Small room, comfortable bed, small closet, small desk, climate controls that actually worked, basic TV/radio/clock appliances… efficient, clean, didn’t really need more than was there. Free breakfast. Reasonably priced, too.
Why shouldn’t so many hotel rooms be so similar? Travelers need the same basic stuff, right? Place to sleep, place for grooming, place for waste disposal, some minimum entertainment, and an alarm clock (sometimes). There are only so many ways to arrange all that, and I’m not at all surprised the designs tend to converge.
The smell is probably because most hotels would use a disinfectant cleaner n the bathroom, and most of them have a aimilar smell. There ARE bathroom cleansers with perfume smells added (mostly pine & citrus smells) – most cleaning products sold for home use have this. But hotels seldom use them, because:
- they cost more (possibly the major reason), but also:
- some customers won’t like whichever smell you choose.
- customers prefer that ‘antiseptic’ smell – not the smell itself, but it reassures them that the hotel bathroom has been thoroughly cleaned.
the same big hotel chain Waldorf Ritz Hilton Hyatt owns all of them.
that and less plumbing.
It’s just a cost effective solution to a design problem. Of course, if you stay in a hotel that was built in the days when the bathroom and toilet was down the hall, you might find different layouts. Any hotel built in the last 40 years or so will function in pretty much the same way.
The St Pancras Renaissance London Hotel, one of London’s most luxurious, was originally The Midland Grand Hotel, built in the 1870s. It had many innovative features such as hydraulic lifts, concrete floors, revolving doors and fireproof floor constructions, though (as was the convention of the time), none of the rooms had bathrooms.
All the rooms are now en suite, you will be happy to know. http://www.marriott.co.uk/hotels/travel/lonpr-st-pancras-renaissance-london-hotel/
Most standard hotel rooms seem to have a kind of L shape, with the bathroom off to one side as you enter, and a built-in wardrobe opposite that, and then the room opening up into the bedroom area.
And why not? I can’t think of a more efficient design. If adjacent rooms are mirror-images, then. as others have said, the plumbing can be shared between rooms. Having the same floorplan on each floor makes the plumbing even easier.
Bathrooms don’t need windows, and it makes sense to have the wardrobe and mirror close to the bathroom and near the exit of the room.
I’ve been in a huge range of hotels/motels price wise. The one consistent thing about them all is that the towels are the low point of the experience. In a motel that will rent rooms by the hour, the towels are stained and threadbare. At a very expensive hotel the towels are still obviously hotel towels, and smell industrial.
Really? Maybe my own towels are below par, but I’ve always like hotel towels, and I like the smell of them too. The smell isn’t particularly pleasant - it always seems slightly “vinegary” to me - but I associate it with holidays. 
Also, in some cases, bits of the plumbing (the toilet cistern) may be accessible from an access panel in the hallway - so the plumber need not enter any rooms to repair it.
I believe in some cases hotels are assembled from factory-built rooms that come complete with furniture, plumbing and artwork.
I do remember something to that effect on one of those 'how how it’s made is made" type programmes - there was a ‘wet wall assembly’ that already had basin, toilet, mirror, lights, shower and bath taps built onto it and they just dropped it in.
I agree with the towels and have to add toilet paper. Even at the 4/5 star hotels I normally stay at they would give a crappy (heh) 1 ply paper that was just awful. It got to the point where I would bring my own toilet paper whenever I was travelling.
You might be thinking of the Hilton Palacio del Rio built in San Antonio in the mid 60’s.
Every hotel I stayed in when visiting Japan had essentially the same pre-fab modular bathroom installed. The only difference between the low-end place in Tokyo and the super-fancy Onsen hotel near Fukuoka was how fancy the toilet was. The main room of the fancy room was 5 times the size, but the bathroom was exactly the same.
Pretty much every hotel I’ve been in has been cookie cutter, as others observed. It’s a matter of efficiency. The main differences have been whether it’s an interior hallway (in which case you open the door, the bathroom is right there, and then there’s the bed area), or exterior hallway (in which case the beds etc. are right there and the bathroom is way in the back.
Two memorable exceptions: A recent stay in a hotel which consisted of two round towers - the room was the same general concept, but not rectangular. Another stay, years back, at a place in Manhattan which was a much older building and the room (suite, really) was very oddly laid out.
I stay at Courtyard by Marriott in many different cities and the first thing I do after I shut the door is go to the bathroom for a leak and look at the same picture by the toliet of blue flowers in a checkered blue and white vase. It just gives me that I’m home feeling; that is if home was a low security federal prison kind of feeling.