I’ve never really been that interested in trends.
They’re useful, to a point. They give you a sense of what’s happening. But they’re rarely where the best ideas come from and they’re almost never what makes a space work.
What I am interested in is how people behave.
How they walk into a space.
Where they hesitate.
Where they naturally gravitate towards.
What makes them stay longer than they planned to.
Those things are far more revealing than any trend report.
When we start a project at 2G, the conversation doesn’t begin with finishes or furniture. It starts with questions.
What does a good night here feel like?
Where does the energy sit?
What happens when it’s busy and what happens when it’s quiet?
How do the team move through the space?
Where do things go wrong?
Because that’s the reality of a space. The lived experience.
I think hospitality has always understood this instinctively.
You can walk into a great restaurant and feel it almost immediately. There’s a sense of ease. Things flow. You don’t have to think too hard about where to go or what to do.
That doesn’t happen by accident. It’s designed.
Not in an obvious way, but in hundreds of small decisions that add up to something that feels right.
What’s interesting now is seeing workplaces catch up.
For a long time, offices were designed around efficiency on paper. Desk numbers. Density. Compliance. The measurable stuff.
Now the question is different: why would someone choose to be here?
And that’s a much harder question to answer.
Because it’s not just about function anymore. It’s about experience.
When you design around people, the commercial benefits follow.
People stay longer.
They interact more.
They come back.
They talk about the space.
It’s not magic. It’s just alignment between how a space is designed and how it’s actually used.
The opposite is also true.
You can always tell when a space has been designed the other way round, driven by a reference, a trend, or something that “worked somewhere else”.
It might look good in a photo. But it doesn’t quite land.
People don’t settle into it.
It feels slightly off.
And over time, that starts to show in how the space performs.
For me, designing around people isn’t a philosophy. It’s just the most practical place to start.
If you understand how a space needs to be used, how it needs to feel, and what people need from it, everything else becomes much clearer.
The materials.
The layout.
The lighting.
The atmosphere.
They stop being aesthetic decisions and start being purposeful ones.
And that’s usually where the best work comes from. Paying attention to what’s actually happening in front of you.
