Discovery Starts with You
Le Méridien wanted more than a hotel website. They wanted a portal into their brand’s world — a place where design, art, music, and travel collide. The challenge: reimagine the digital experience to feel less like a booking engine and more like a journey of discovery. The solution was a deeply interactive, sensory-driven experience that fused cutting-edge interface design with original art and sound.
By transforming a traditional hotel website into an interactive sensory journey, the redesign positioned Le Méridien as a hospitality brand that celebrates curiosity, creativity, and culture. It invited guests not just to book a room, but to begin their trip the moment they arrived online.
HOTEL SEARCH
Your inspiration canvas
One of the most groundbreaking features was the Destination Canvas — a visual search engine designed to match travelers to their ideal destinations in a way no drop-down menu ever could.
Instead of typing keywords, guests select images representing their personal passions — food, architecture, beaches, art, nightlife — and place them on a blank digital canvas. They can resize and reposition each image to show its importance. Once complete, the system transforms the collage into a curated set of hotel and destination recommendations aligned to the guest’s interests.
It’s search as self-expression — turning inspiration into itineraries.
WEB SITE
The site created a deeply interactive experience from an interactive home page with an original sound experience crafted by French composer Henri Scars Struck to a visual search engine that would use your one of a kind collage to recommend the best hotels for you.
The Web site’s home page is a three-dimensional space that allows customers to navigate through the world of Le Meridien by selecting images associated with Le Méridien hotels, LM100 members, brand initiatives, and more. This is combined with an original sound experience, crafted by French composer Henri Scars Struck, which plays as customers navigate through LeMeridien.com. The sound collage is dynamically mixed with background music that changes depending on the time of day. The concept for the site re-design ‘Discovery Starts with You’ was created as a collaboration between my design group and the Swedish interactive agency North Kingdom.
PRESS
Featured in the iPhone launch TV commercial
One of the most unique aspects is its ‘Destination Canvas’ that connects guests’ interests with Le Méridien hotels and destinations. Guests choose images depicting their passion points, and they are placed on a white canvas where they can change the size and position to signify the importance of the experience. When the mood board is finished, the site provides destination recommendations that reflect the guest’s passions.
MOBILE DESIGN
It comes in compact sizes too
I also spent a year designing a mobile web version of the LeMeridien site and all 9 of Starwood brand sites. This was done because the desktop site was optimized to work on tablets so the site is served to desktop and tablets while the mobile web version is given to all mobile phones.
