Overview
Quiet Luxury was the antidote to a decade of excess, and it worked because some brands adopted it while others did not. However, now that every hotel brand is using the same muted colour palette and textures, the language invented to escape sameness has produced a new sameness, softer than the last one and considerably harder to see.
This article introduces the emerging concept of ‘Rooted Luxury’, meaning luxury that draws its value from origin, from what a place, its people and its culture make possible nowhere else. Origin as the source of the experience, not just its decoration.
The trickier question is who will truly embody this concept. Can systems built on repetition create unique places that exist nowhere else, or will locality simply become the next template, applied late like a finishing touch?
Same Room, Different City
Somewhere in the world this week, a luxury hotel is opening with a lobby of travertine, pale oak and raw linen, lit low enough that the small logo behind the desk seems almost embarrassed to be there. The music is so carefully designed to blend into the background that guests will never quite remember hearing it. Everything about the room is intelligent as well, calm and expensive in the least demonstrative way possible, and a traveller waking up in it after a long flight would need to check a phone to be certain of having landed in London, Mexico City or Bangkok. The room was designed to whisper, and it does. The trouble is that it whispers the same sentence as a hundred other rooms finished in the same eighteen months.
Quiet Luxury deserves a fair hearing before anyone writes its obituary. It emerged as a genuine correction, an answer to a decade of fatigue with logos, marble and abundance treated as a personality, and it proposed something that felt almost moral at the time: restraint as taste, discretion as confidence. It worked because it was a position, something certain brands chose while others did not.
What changed is that the entire industry agreed with it at once. Hilton’s 2026 Trends Report went as far as coining the word ‘hushpitality’ for the pursuit of calm. Accor launched its newest ultra-luxury collection, Emblems, with quiet luxury named as its founding philosophy in the brand’s own press material. The design press now files restraint under best practice rather than point of view, and the vocabulary of hush has hardened into a category code: mute the palette, shrink the logo, lower the voice.
A woman walking in Varanasi, Uttar Pradesh, India. Photo by Arka Dutta (@barefootonthegrass), published on Unsplash on 22 October 2021.
The difficulty with restraint as a strategy is that it is subtraction, and subtraction is the most copyable move in branding. Removing things requires no heritage, no place and no particular truth – only discipline and a good art director, which is why the palettes converged so quickly. A language invented to escape sameness has produced a new sameness, softer than the previous one and considerably harder to see. When every brand in the category whispers, the whisper stops meaning anything. None of this makes quiet luxury wrong. It simply raises the question of what follows a virtue once everyone has adopted it.
Introducing Rooted Luxury
The answer is already taking shape across the industry, and since it does not yet have a name, we have given it one: Rooted Luxury. Rooted Luxury is luxury that draws its value from origin, from what a place, its people and its culture make possible nowhere else. Local colour applied to a global formula does not qualify, and neither does a mural by a regional artist hanging in an interchangeable corridor; Rooted Luxury means origin as the source of the experience rather than its decoration.
The two eras ask different questions of a brand. Quiet Luxury asked how little a property could show. Rooted Luxury asks what could only happen here, and the difference between those two questions explains why one era is closing while the other opens. The first can be answered anywhere by anyone, which is precisely why its answers now look identical from Mayfair to Marina Bay. The second has a different answer in every place on earth, and no answer at all for a brand that has not done the slow work of belonging somewhere.
‘People in orange and yellow traditional dress walking on brown sand during daytime’. Photo by Ken Kahiri (@kahiriken), published on Unsplash on 26 October 2020.
This is also why Rooted Luxury cannot simply become the next aesthetic to adopt. Subtraction can be copied by definition; origin cannot. A dish that exists because of one river, a word that refuses translation, a way of receiving a guest shaped by centuries of a particular culture: these are not styles but facts about a place, and facts are the one raw material a competitor cannot source.
We are far from alone in noticing the shift, and the most telling evidence sits inside the quiet luxury brands themselves. The same Accor press release that names quiet luxury as Emblems’ philosophy promises, a sentence later, properties that reflect the soul of their destination, guided by the motto ‘It’s the Soul that makes Emblems’. The industry’s newest luxury collection is speaking both languages at once, which tells you which way it is leaning. IHG followed in February 2026 with the launch of its twenty-first brand, Noted Collection, which is built entirely on story-driven, hyper-local properties. This wave now extends across every major hospitality group, from Marriott’s Autograph and Tribute portfolios to Hilton’s Curio and Outset.
‘Three colorful traditional Indonesian puppets in a row’. Photo by Walyudin (@walyudin) and published on Unsplash on 28 April 2026.
The design world is moving the same direction: the landscape architecture firm EDSA lists destination-first thinking among its ten defining design principles for 2026 (Scott LaMont, January 2026), and FINN Partners’ design outlook observes a generation of travellers turning away from stays that feel interchangeable across the globe and toward properties deeply rooted in their destinations (FINN Partners, December 2025). Reporting from June of this year describes the same movement on the demand side, with affluent travellers increasingly choosing properties that reflect the culture, landscape and character of a destination over a standardised luxury experience, however polished (Hospitality.today, June 2026). And the model itself is older than the trend: Aman built its reputation on connection to place decades ago, and Rosewood has carried A Sense of Place as its stated philosophy since long before the industry needed a new word for it.
The Slow Work, or the Shortcut
An honest naming of the era also has to include its paradox, which is that unrepeatability is now being offered at scale, by global systems built on repetition. Whether a portfolio can genuinely produce places that could exist nowhere else, or whether locality simply becomes the next template, rootedness applied as a finish late in the process, is the open question of the coming decade. We do not believe the question disqualifies the movement. We believe it will decide who is remembered for it, because the brands that start from place will age very differently from the ones that merely arrive at it.
Rooted Luxury asks more of a brand than a palette ever did. It asks a company to begin from the place rather than the reference deck, to treat whatever refuses translation as an asset rather than a friction, and to accept that some of what makes a place valuable will never fit inside a caption without being diminished by it. That is harder work than restraint, and it is the only work that cannot be copied. Quiet Luxury taught the industry to lower its voice. What comes next asks it to have something to say that could be said now here else.
‘Two people on boats’. Photo by Pat Kay (@patkay) and published on Unsplash on 20 February 2019.
Sources
- Hilton, 2026 Trends Report, October 2025, in partnership with Ipsos (14,000 travellers, 14 countries), stories.hilton.com/2026trends
- Accor Newsroom, Emblems Collection, Accor’s new luxury brand, unveils its first property in the United Kingdom, November 2025, press.accor.com
- Hospitality Investor, IHG launches Noted Collection, its 21st brand, amid bullish view on conversions, 17 February 2026, hospitalityinvestor.com
- Scott LaMont (EDSA), Top 10 Luxury Hospitality Design Trends for 2026, Hospitality Net, 15 January 2026, hospitalitynet.org
- FINN Partners, The Blueprint of Luxury Hospitality Design Trends, 5 December 2025, finnpartners.com
- today, Luxury travelers are rewriting the hospitality playbook, 8 June 2026, hospitality.today
- Rosewood Hotels & Resorts, A Sense of Place, brand philosophy, rosewoodhotels.com
