There are guests who travel across the world to Klosters just to see the painted murals on the façade of the Chesa Grischuna. That detail comes from a recent essay by Monocle's design editor Nic Monisse on why the predicted death of the hotel never happened. A decade ago, the industry consensus said Airbnb would finish hotels off. The opposite occurred — and the reasons are worth every property owner's attention.
Travellers came back to hotels, Monisse argues, because the best ones offer what Chesa Grischuna's Constantin Ziegenhain calls "good hardware": architecture, rooms and objects so considered that they shape the entire stay. Charlie Luxton of Wiltshire's Teffont House describes composing "a series of vignettes" — distinct moods for working, reading, talking. "It's fascinating, the power that the design of a hotel has over how people behave when they're staying," he told Monocle. A rented apartment, however charming, can't orchestrate that. It's someone else's home, with someone else's inconsistencies.
We'd take the argument one room further — into the hotel bathroom.
A property will agonise over the lobby chairs and the breakfast room, then stock the guest bathroom with the same anonymous bulk toiletries as every chain hotel — usually chosen by whoever renews the cleaning contract. Yet hotel amenities are the most intimate hardware in the building. Guests don't just look at them; they wash with them, twice a day, and the little bottle at the sink is often the last thing they touch before checking out. If design dictates how guests feel, the hotel bathroom is doing more quiet work than almost any other room.
Why we make hotel amenities at all
Plainly started in hand care, but our amenities line exists because of a gap we kept seeing from inside the design world: most suppliers treat hotel toiletries as a procurement line. High minimum order quantities. Contract durations. Formulations built down to a price. The result: the most personal products in the room are the least considered ones.
We do it differently, because we come from the same world as the properties we supply — design, aesthetics, and the conviction that small details make the difference:
- Real ingredients, no synthetic fillers. Our formulations are built on ingredients you recognise — argan oil, almond oil, hyaluronic acid, aloe vera, panthenol — not on cheap bulk bases. Vegan, sulfate-free, 100% made in Germany.
- A shampoo good enough that hair professionals ask to carry it. We didn't want a "hotel shampoo" — we wanted the best shampoo we could make, and then put it in hotels. The result, sulfate-free with argan and almond oil, is now requested by hair salons and stylists for their own use. When the product at the guest sink is one professionals want on their shelves, the bathroom stops being an afterthought.
- An object that earns its place at the sink. Packaging by Winkreative — Monocle's sister agency — awarded the iF Design Award in 2023.
- No minimum order, no contract — by conviction. Most suppliers lock properties into volumes and durations. We don't, because we don't need to: our products speak for themselves. If they ever stop working for your house, you simply stop ordering — or tell us what's missing, and we improve the formulation. That feedback loop is how the line got this good.
- Consistency, the thing rentals lack. Refillable 250ml bottles in the bathroom, 5L canisters back of house — the two-hundredth guest gets exactly what the first one did.
Which points at the honest flip side of Monisse's essay: hardware is adoptable. The premium apartments and design-led stays now competing with hotels — several write to us every month — win by borrowing this playbook. You may not commission murals. You can decide what your guests' hands touch at the sink.
It's how Hotel Cortiina in Munich approaches its bathrooms, and why properties from boutique houses to Bachmair Weissach Spa & Resort work with us. The hotel bathroom is small hardware. It is not minor.
Curious how our amenities feel in your own bathrooms? Order the products to test — we credit the full amount against your first order.
Source: Nic Monisse, “Why hotels are more popular than Airbnbs” (Monocle, August 2026). Photography of Teffont House courtesy of Monocle; all rights remain with Monocle.
