The original note, as written at the time
What if you design space for people to just hang out? Every group of friends or family can pay for a night to just hang out together in a designated and well designed space without worrying about travelling late to their respective homes.
Ongoing development
Design space for people to just hang out: a group of friends or a family can pay for a night to be together in a designated, well-designed space, without worrying about travelling late to their respective homes.
The design brief is entirely in the last clause. What stops people spending an evening together is not the cost of the room. It is the journey home at midnight, and the fact that the evening has a cliff edge — a closing time, a last matatu, a driver who has been drinking.
Everything about a normal venue is organised around the cliff. Chairs that encourage turnover, music that rises, lights that come up. A night house removes the cliff, and once you remove it the evening changes shape: people cook, they argue, they fall asleep on a sofa, and the conversation that happens at three in the morning is not the conversation that happens at nine.
The building type this belongs to is not a hotel and not a club. It is closer to a large house — a kitchen, several rooms, bathrooms, somewhere to be loud and somewhere to be quiet, and beds that are available but not mandatory.
The design problems are real and they are thermal, acoustic and social at once. Sleeping accommodation for a group that may not all sleep. Sound separation between the loud room and the sleeping one. A night manager who is not a bouncer, because the whole point is that nobody is being policed.
The measure of success is not occupancy. It is whether a family books it again next month, which they will only do if they left without having to solve transport at one in the morning.