Bespoke Access Awards: the highlights

Posted in Events, News on 27 November, 2017

Bespoke Access Awards, an International design competition for fully accessible hotel rooms, with a prize fund of £30,000, took place at the Channel 4’s Head Office in London.

Here are the highlights from this year!

The award was launched by The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in association with Bespoke Hotels and has Paralympic Gold Medalist Baroness Tanni Grey-Thompson and RIBA Stirling Prize-winning architect Alan Stanton OBE among their judges.

The Awards are an international competition to design fully accessible hotel rooms, to continue improving access to properties worldwide for disabled people, including those with learning difficulties, as well as all other guests. The Awards aim to challenge the perception of hotel facilities set aside for disabled people, which can often be viewed as joyless, poorly designed and over-medicalised.

The Bespoke Access Awards were established in 2016 and were the first awards of their kind. In their opening year, teams of designers from countries as far afield as Hong Kong, Russia and Canada submit entries across a range of categories. The overall winners, awarded the Celia Thomas Prize worth £20,000, were Motionspot & Ryder Architecture, who devised ‘AllGo’, a unique, universalised approach to hotel room design system to ensure that all hotel rooms are functional, flexible and accessible.

The other judges are Robin Sheppard, Chairman of Bespoke Hotels and Hotel Sector Champion for Disabled People; Baroness Celia Thomas, Patron of the Access Awards Graeme K Whipper MBE, Disability Specialist for Channel 4; Alastair Hignall CBE, Trustee of the Leonard Cheshire Foundation; Sarah Weird OBE, Chief Executive of Design Council; and Paul Gregory, MCIBSE, MSLL, Global Specification Director for Dyson.

Here are the highlights from this year!