Narrative Design in Hospitality

Guests don’t book a room the way they used to. Rather than relying solely on location or price point, today travelers choose properties based on the story they share and the distinct emotional experience they offer. Today’s guests arrive with two sets of expectations: functional ones, like premium amenities and easy access to a destination’s best offerings, and emotional aspects that connect the story of a place to their own life’s experiences. Fulfilling these expectations demands far more than an aesthetically pleasing lobby. It requires a narrative and experiential journey conceived with the same level of thoughtfulness and intent as the surrounding architecture.

RSM Design has spent nearly three decades building that kind of intention into hotels, starting with the firm’s very first project, completed in 1997 for Walt Disney Imagineering. In the years since, hospitality has remained a deep specialty across our studios, with work touching brands and properties like One & Only, Aman, St. Regis, The Ritz, Hotel Drover in Fort Worth’s historic Stockyards, Hotel MiraCosta in Tokyo, and many flag sponsored boutique brands including Autograph Collection Hotels and Curio Collection by Hilton. As BDNY gathers the industry in November to explore what today’s travelers truly seek, Hall Park Hotel, a new Autograph Collection destination in Frisco, Texas, serves as a premier model of narrative-driven hospitality. The property demonstrates how a compelling brand story elevates guest expectations and serves as a foundation for an experience driven stay.

Nestled within HALL Park, a transformed 1980s corporate complex in Frisco reimagined as a contemporary mixed-use community, Hall Park Hotel draws its core vision directly from its founders, Craig and Kathryn Hall. As the son of an art teacher and the daughter of California grape growers, they have led a storied life at the intersection of art, wine, and hospitality. Hall Park Hotel extends that legacy into an engaging, experiential journey built around wine, food, and art.

As a Marriott Autograph Collection, the property needed a narrative strong enough to carry that fusion across each part of a guest’s stay, from arrival, to dinner, to the moments in between. Working with the client team at HALL Group, and the operator Coury Hospitality, our team at RSM Design began a thoughtful exploration of the story, user journey mapping, and analyzing the flow and details of the site to choreograph a symphony of sights, feelings, aromas and flavors that make the stay at Hall Park Hotel unlike any other.

Once opened, the recognition followed quickly. Hall Park Hotel earned Marriott International’s Hotel Opening of the Year honor in 2025. Following this, USA Today’s 10 Best Readers’ Choice rankings named Hall Park Hotel the #9 best new hotel in the country for 2026. The hotel also holds AAA Four Diamond status and was named Hospitality Project of the Year in D CEO’s 2025 Commercial Real Estate Awards. Accolades like these stem from a brand giving a property a narrative truly worthy of recognition.

A blend of deep research, stakeholder engagement, and story development, our discovery process supplies a foundation for brand strategy and explores the big ideas that will serve as the wellspring for the defining narratives for your brand in later stages. In the case of HALL Park Hotel, RSM Design began our work in discovery, researching the world of wine, delving into the Hall’s intention for the art curation, and studying the site and city’s history. Though sometimes overlooked, for our team, the research phase is paramount to the user journey. It is here we are able to uncover the unique stories that guide connections between the guest and the hotel experience, from holistic narratives and pillars, to the smallest touchpoints, and design details.

From these foundations we began the process of building the hotel’s brand from the ground up: vision and narrative work first. At RSM Design we believe in the power of a strong strategy. It allows our team to articulate our intentions, align with client and consultant teams, and ensure a thorough understanding of the ideals we are seeking to express in design before the first symbol is sketched, or image is explored. This establishes a touchstone with which we can compare our designs and is an invaluable tool in decision making for group conversations and larger teams in developing not just appealing brands, but effective brands.  At HALL Park Hotel our research led to a positioning built on a simple idea: a hotel at the intersection of wine and art, creativity and hospitality, offering locals and guests alike a rich set of sensory experiences that explore America’s finest wines, and bring world-class art to viewers in an intimate space outside of the traditional gallery or museum setting. Four brand pillars carried that positioning forward:

A Symphony of Sights: iconic, immersive, and awe-inspiring expressions in food, wine, and art. 

Nourishing the Spirit: exhilarating experiences paired with comforting, attentive service. 

Minimal Yet Meaningful Design: intentional spaces built to heighten sensory clarity and clear away the clutter of the modern world. 

Creative Connections: breaking down conventional hospitality boundaries to create unbound connections to place and the senses. 

These pillars helped build the hotel, and still serve to guide the on property team in design and decision making today.

Hall Park Hotel is nestled beside Kaleidoscope Park, and the brand’s fingerprints show up in the experiences built around that setting, including a picnic experience choreographed to move a guest from the hotel into the park itself. By offering room service as roam service, guests are treated to an elevated picnic style dinner in the park underneath the iconic and immersive art piece Butterfly Rest Stop by Janet Echelman.

In today’s hospitality market, food and beverage experiences are paramount to successful stays. To connect to the Hall’s rich history as winemakers, the restaurant Palato offers HALL wine tasting flights, blind tasting experiences to connect guests to flavors, and a guided blending experience where guests can develop their own unique creation through blending of a set of supplied varietals. These experiences were all conceived by the RSM Design team through our unique process which explores user journey through the lens of our strategic vision.

The thoughtful design of the guest experience is nowhere more evident than in the back of house training of the hotel’s staff. Guided by RSM Design and the vision document, HALL Park Hotel built a certification system for its team, with pins that mark a staff member’s expertise: Docent of Art for those trained to lead guests through the property’s sculpture and art collection, Local Guide for those trained in Kaleidoscope Park and the surrounding Frisco area, and Vintner of Wine for those trained to lead a blending or blind tasting. The brand doesn’t stop at signage and collateral, it extends into what a guest can expect from the person standing behind the front desk.