Every year in December, Pantone releases its color of the year. In recent years, the selections have been a neutral brown, a soft peach, a vibrant magenta and even a periwinkle blue. But this year, the company's color of the year selection was Cloud Dancer — a calming hue of white, a color notoriously challenging for hotel design.
Molly Forman, interior designer at Washington, D.C.-based boutique design firm //3877, said that Pantone's annual announcement always generates buzz in the greater design industry and among her hospitality clients. But she said the response to this Pantone color choice has been mostly opposition to incorporating the color into hotel design.
"Light, white colors in hotels are very, very difficult," she said. "We're designing for durability. We need longevity."
While it's unlikely Cloud Dancer will be a central color in a hotel's design, it could make a great accent or wall color in the right case. Laura McKoy, chief creative officer at Omni Hotels & Resorts, said she's worked on a few projects recently that have sought out white wall colors so as not to contrast with the breathtaking views surrounding certain resorts.
McKoy mentioned hotels such as the Omni Scottsdale Resort & Spa at Montelucia, Omni La Costa Resort & Spa and Omni Pontoque Resort at Punta de Mita, expected to open outside Puerto Vallarta in 2027. At those resorts, "the landscaping is so stunning that we wanted the room to kind of be a retreat from that," she said, "and when you looked out the window, that you were seeing all the colors on the landscaping and the walls were not competing."
Another hotel McKoy said recently incorporated white into its design is the Omni Parker House in Boston. The 551-key historic hotel has a smaller room layout, so in the recent renovation, the hotel painted the guestroom walls a white color to make the space feel more open.
When McKoy saw the Pantone announcement, she thought it didn't really seem like a color, rather more of a background design choice. She said designers are always searching for the ideal shade of white that doesn't have too much of an undertone one way or the other or that doesn't pull too much from other colors.
"We're all looking for that perfect white. Is Cloud Dancer that perfect white for this year?" she asked.
Both Forman and McKoy agree that regardless of what color Pantone picks each year, they take the selection with a grain of salt when it comes to hotel design. Hotels need to be designed timelessly and avoid trends in general. But Forman said she does glean important information from trend announcements like this one. The selection of Cloud Dancer and the reasoning behind it resonates with what she's seeing hotel guests want.
"The importance to us, especially in hotels, is actually more on, oddly enough, the psychological end," she said. "It tells us a little bit more of a story about how people are feeling or what people are thinking."
In its explanation of the selection, Pantone said that Cloud Dancer "serves as a symbol of calming influence in a frenetic society rediscovering the value of measured consideration and quiet reflection."
Presenting calm and serenity is a hotel design trend Forman has seen a lot during the second half of this year.
"Everybody wants this sense of of relaxation and this sense of visual comfort within the space somewhere. And so I think for that reason, psychologically, it very much makes sense," she said.
But there are other design elements that can accomplish this while still maintaining durability that white textiles would not be able to provide, Forman said. She added hotel design might trend toward more neutral colors with textiles with multiple textures.
"I think we're going to see potentially spaces that have a little bit less contrast in them. Or taking a single-color, monochromatic approach or a single-tone approach to color use," Forman said.
All of this falls in line with another trend Forman has been seeing in design: quiet luxury, which originated in the fashion world before expanding to other types of design. She hopes to see this trend evolve to include more twists of "integrated whimsical elements into it" in the new year, she said.
But hotel guests shouldn't expect to see more white — Cloud Dancer or otherwise — in hotels following the Pantone announcement.
"It's important from a contrast perspective," Forman said. "But I think largely in the hospitality field — although we love our white beds — cleanability is still paramount, and an all-white anything is just very hard to sell in hotels."