“The most important thing today is that you walk into a place and leave it better.” Corinna Kretschmar-Joehnk did not need a new certification system, an elaborate formula or even a carbon metric to describe what good design should achieve. Just that sentence. A hotel, office, gym or restaurant should ideally send people back out healthier, calmer or at least in a slightly better mood than when they entered.
At SommerWerkschau26 on 16 July 2026 at Munich’s Alte Fruchthof, the founder and current Senior Advisor of JOI-Design had originally planned to speak about Green Hospitality Design. On stage, she renamed the subject. “Empathic design”, she called it. That was probably the better choice. Green has become a standard ingredient on almost every second moodboard. Empathy takes a little more explaining.
Kretschmar-Joehnk started remarkably far upstream. The future, she argued, is not some mysterious condition thirty years away. It begins in three minutes. Anyone who switches on a phone in bed and immediately lets news, crises, climate change and the rest of the world pour in can understand why interiors do not necessarily need to launch another competition for attention.
Her guiding themes were correspondingly ambitious: health, responsibility, nature, culture, community and authenticity, with sustainability above all of them. Sustainability, in her view, should no longer qualify as a special selling point. It ought to be the baseline. That is an appealing position – and one the industry may still need some time to reach. As long as resource-conscious construction is remarkable, it is clearly not yet routine.
The talk became more interesting when Kretschmar-Joehnk attached those large ideas to actual spaces. Under the heading of health, she showed a sound-meditation room at Dusit Thani in Bangkok alongside projects from her own practice. Her practical demand was simple: gyms should not automatically be banished to the basement. Daylight, views, art and nature can turn a room full of exercise equipment into somewhere people might genuinely want to spend time.
That sounds obvious. It only does because decades of hospitality planning somehow managed to assume that the very spaces intended for recovery and physical wellbeing could do perfectly well without windows. At a JOI-Design project in Lenggries, the fitness area moved upwards instead. Mountains rather than a concrete wall. No new design manifesto required.
Kretschmar-Joehnk also sees little reason to maintain a hard border between hotels and offices. Coworking is moving into hospitality while hospitality is moving into workplaces. For Olympus’ European headquarters in Hamburg, JOI-Design created areas for working, eating, talking and occasionally thinking from a swing. Her argument was straightforward: people spend so many hours at work that the workplace should at the very least not make them ill. It is a surprisingly low bar for good office design. The fact that it still needs stating says plenty.
Empathic design also means not treating users merely as demographic abstractions. When JOI-Design developed a children’s area for a river cruise ship, children themselves were consulted. They asked for a cave. From a planner’s perspective it was awkward: difficult to supervise, difficult to clean. From a child’s perspective it was apparently excellent. Kretschmar-Joehnk said it became highly popular. Sometimes user-centred design begins where perfect housekeeping logic ends.
She made a similar point about senior living. Why should people suddenly acquire a taste for a conservative institutional aesthetic simply because they grow older? Kretschmar-Joehnk argued for environments that remain closer to the lifestyles and expectations of their residents. Again, that sounds self-evident. The reality of much senior housing suggests self-evident ideas can require an extraordinary amount of design work.
From empathy, the talk moved into community. In showrooms, hotels and clubs, Kretschmar-Joehnk appeared less interested in the most beautiful individual object than in spaces where people actually do something together. At Alila Shanghai, this made an artificial tree one of her favourite examples. Called “Gathering”, the work by Chinese artist Oscar Wang forms the centre of a landscaped interior organised around water, circulation and places to stay.
The name suited her argument almost suspiciously well. Gathering, she said, is precisely what people need again. Fountains, market squares, maypoles or church steps once performed that function. Today, a luxury hotel may install a five-metre artwork to recreate it. The social need is evidently older than the business model.
Kretschmar-Joehnk spent considerable time on Six Senses London. The hotel occupies the redeveloped former Whiteleys department store and combines hospitality, spa, membership club and sustainability programmes. Its grand staircase was restored and rebuilt, while plants now occupy former display vitrines. Herbs become tinctures and tonics in workshops, fermentation is part of the food programme, and the members’ club combines social interaction with wellbeing.
The concept is impressively consistent. It also reveals the commercial side of contemporary wellbeing. Wellness is no longer an additional service; it is a product, programme and membership proposition. Sustainability and longevity become components of luxury. That does not automatically make them dishonest. But a plant in a cabinet does not magically cancel the resource consumption of an international luxury hotel either.
Kretschmar-Joehnk’s strongest examples do not need that moral surplus. Nature can enter interiors through planting, water, timber, colour or abstract form. What matters is that it becomes more than decorative evidence of virtue. She showed The Siam in Bangkok and Alila in Shanghai; on a river cruise ship, JOI-Design translated the passing riverbanks into materials and colours. Place should not disappear behind a globally interchangeable design language.
That is why culture became another of her central themes. Raised in a family of musicians, Kretschmar-Joehnk describes culture as a personal thread running through her work. She herself considers the much-used term “storytelling” thoroughly overworked. Her underlying point nevertheless stands: a project does not become local because somebody hangs an archival photograph on a wall and gives the cocktails regional names. Culture has to reach further into materials, form, craft and history.
At a project on Lake Tegernsee, for example, JOI-Design used the historical figure Caroline of Bavaria as a muse. Soft forms, textile details and restrained references translated the story without turning the hotel into a theme park. In Agra, the team referenced the floral stone inlays of the Taj Mahal not by putting cold marble behind the bed, but by translating the motifs into embroidery on pale fabric. Reference rather than replica – a distinction that could improve a great many “locally inspired” hotels.
Then came perhaps Kretschmar-Joehnk’s most contemporary line: authenticity, she said, is the “true and honest” answer to AI. As a definition of artificial intelligence, that is rather abbreviated. As a design position, it works better. The easier it becomes to generate images, narratives and complete visual worlds synthetically, the more valuable things rooted in an actual place, its people and history may become.
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“The most important thing today is that you walk into a place and leave it better.” Corinna Kretschmar-Joehnk did not need a new certification system, an elaborate formula or even a carbon metric to describe what good design should achieve. Just that sentence. A hotel, office, gym or restaurant should ideally send people back out healthier, calmer or at least in a slightly better mood than when they entered.
At SommerWerkschau26 on 16 July 2026 at Munich’s Alte Fruchthof, the founder and current Senior Advisor of JOI-Design had originally planned to speak about Green Hospitality Design. On stage, she renamed the subject. “Empathic design”, she called it. That was probably the better choice. Green has become a standard ingredient on almost every second moodboard. Empathy takes a little more explaining.
Kretschmar-Joehnk started remarkably far upstream. The future, she argued, is not some mysterious condition thirty years away. It begins in three minutes. Anyone who switches on a phone in bed and immediately lets news, crises, climate change and the rest of the world pour in can understand why interiors do not necessarily need to launch another competition for attention.
Her guiding themes were correspondingly ambitious: health, responsibility, nature, culture, community and authenticity, with sustainability above all of them. Sustainability, in her view, should no longer qualify as a special selling point. It ought to be the baseline. That is an appealing position – and one the industry may still need some time to reach. As long as resource-conscious construction is remarkable, it is clearly not yet routine.
The talk became more interesting when Kretschmar-Joehnk attached those large ideas to actual spaces. Under the heading of health, she showed a sound-meditation room at Dusit Thani in Bangkok alongside projects from her own practice. Her practical demand was simple: gyms should not automatically be banished to the basement. Daylight, views, art and nature can turn a room full of exercise equipment into somewhere people might genuinely want to spend time.
That sounds obvious. It only does because decades of hospitality planning somehow managed to assume that the very spaces intended for recovery and physical wellbeing could do perfectly well without windows. At a JOI-Design project in Lenggries, the fitness area moved upwards instead. Mountains rather than a concrete wall. No new design manifesto required.
Kretschmar-Joehnk also sees little reason to maintain a hard border between hotels and offices. Coworking is moving into hospitality while hospitality is moving into workplaces. For Olympus’ European headquarters in Hamburg, JOI-Design created areas for working, eating, talking and occasionally thinking from a swing. Her argument was straightforward: people spend so many hours at work that the workplace should at the very least not make them ill. It is a surprisingly low bar for good office design. The fact that it still needs stating says plenty.
Empathic design also means not treating users merely as demographic abstractions. When JOI-Design developed a children’s area for a river cruise ship, children themselves were consulted. They asked for a cave. From a planner’s perspective it was awkward: difficult to supervise, difficult to clean. From a child’s perspective it was apparently excellent. Kretschmar-Joehnk said it became highly popular. Sometimes user-centred design begins where perfect housekeeping logic ends.
She made a similar point about senior living. Why should people suddenly acquire a taste for a conservative institutional aesthetic simply because they grow older? Kretschmar-Joehnk argued for environments that remain closer to the lifestyles and expectations of their residents. Again, that sounds self-evident. The reality of much senior housing suggests self-evident ideas can require an extraordinary amount of design work.
From empathy, the talk moved into community. In showrooms, hotels and clubs, Kretschmar-Joehnk appeared less interested in the most beautiful individual object than in spaces where people actually do something together. At Alila Shanghai, this made an artificial tree one of her favourite examples. Called “Gathering”, the work by Chinese artist Oscar Wang forms the centre of a landscaped interior organised around water, circulation and places to stay.
The name suited her argument almost suspiciously well. Gathering, she said, is precisely what people need again. Fountains, market squares, maypoles or church steps once performed that function. Today, a luxury hotel may install a five-metre artwork to recreate it. The social need is evidently older than the business model.
Kretschmar-Joehnk spent considerable time on Six Senses London. The hotel occupies the redeveloped former Whiteleys department store and combines hospitality, spa, membership club and sustainability programmes. Its grand staircase was restored and rebuilt, while plants now occupy former display vitrines. Herbs become tinctures and tonics in workshops, fermentation is part of the food programme, and the members’ club combines social interaction with wellbeing.
The concept is impressively consistent. It also reveals the commercial side of contemporary wellbeing. Wellness is no longer an additional service; it is a product, programme and membership proposition. Sustainability and longevity become components of luxury. That does not automatically make them dishonest. But a plant in a cabinet does not magically cancel the resource consumption of an international luxury hotel either.
Kretschmar-Joehnk’s strongest examples do not need that moral surplus. Nature can enter interiors through planting, water, timber, colour or abstract form. What matters is that it becomes more than decorative evidence of virtue. She showed The Siam in Bangkok and Alila in Shanghai; on a river cruise ship, JOI-Design translated the passing riverbanks into materials and colours. Place should not disappear behind a globally interchangeable design language.
That is why culture became another of her central themes. Raised in a family of musicians, Kretschmar-Joehnk describes culture as a personal thread running through her work. She herself considers the much-used term “storytelling” thoroughly overworked. Her underlying point nevertheless stands: a project does not become local because somebody hangs an archival photograph on a wall and gives the cocktails regional names. Culture has to reach further into materials, form, craft and history.
At a project on Lake Tegernsee, for example, JOI-Design used the historical figure Caroline of Bavaria as a muse. Soft forms, textile details and restrained references translated the story without turning the hotel into a theme park. In Agra, the team referenced the floral stone inlays of the Taj Mahal not by putting cold marble behind the bed, but by translating the motifs into embroidery on pale fabric. Reference rather than replica – a distinction that could improve a great many “locally inspired” hotels.
Then came perhaps Kretschmar-Joehnk’s most contemporary line: authenticity, she said, is the “true and honest” answer to AI. As a definition of artificial intelligence, that is rather abbreviated. As a design position, it works better. The easier it becomes to generate images, narratives and complete visual worlds synthetically, the more valuable things rooted in an actual place, its people and history may become.