This article goes on to make a very specific point about the experience of this company, in the state where it is based, which is not so much what caught my attention (more on which below):

Jim Brett, the president of West Elm, the furniture chain that sells what you might call mainstream modern furniture, was looking for the brand’s next act. He didn’t think he’d find it at the mall; West Elm already has more than a hundred stores. Children’s furniture might have been a logical next step, but it is burdened by complex safety regulations. Where else do lots of people sleep and sit? Brett, a frequent traveller, had spent countless nights in sterile, unwelcoming rooms. Hotels seemed like a good opportunity.

Last year, West Elm opened a commercial division for office furniture, and the company is now making furniture for Marriott’s SpringHill Suites hotels. More significantly, West Elm also signed a deal with a partner to open its own branded hotels. Brett and other executives discussed design ideas and scouted locations in mid-tier U.S. cities whose hotel markets seemed underdeveloped. Charlotte, North Carolina, was especially promising.

I had never heard of this company before, and do not know anything about West Elm other than what I have read in this brief article. Its furniture looks fine to me. Its prototype room in the photo looks fine to me too.

But I am struck by the notion that the business I have been involved in since the 1990s, developing and operating specialty lodging, is among other things exactly what Mr. Brett saw it to be: another kind of showroom. Mainstream furnishings, normally seen in a standard retail showroom (or perhaps just in a catalog or on a website) might be more effectively experienced over an extended period in order to test their comfort and other user-friendliness features. Why not?

Lodging, at its best, is a showcase of a place; so the interiors and especially a guest room can serve as a showroom for that same place. Chain hotels have tended historically to source from central locations to create a standardized appeal; increasingly they are going local. My hope is always that everything about a hotel that can be local will be local, and we do our best to make that happen. And we try to ensure that local products are available for guests to take home with them to remember the place, talk about it, share it.

This article reminds me that we can and should do more to highlight these place-specific showcased items.