Hometels. If you’ve never heard of them, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s just a typo. But it’s not. Hometels are a modern innovation. They offer inhabitants a new level of convenience, community, accessibility while being an environmentally-friendly alternative. Often equipped with offices, restaurants, bars, a gym, and more, they diminish the need for residents to commute anywhere throughout their day. And, this revolution, as a whole, represents the most disruptive concept in home rentals and real estate since Airbnb.
What is a Hometel?
Like many, you might not yet be familiar with this novel concept. A hometel is a hotel-meets-home. Imagine all the amenities of a hotel being directly connected to your home, and you’ll have the general definition, but that’s not enough to do the idea justice. For that, we’ll need to paint a picture. Here’s a look at your typical day in a hometel:
6:30 a.m.
You start to make breakfast, then realise you’re out of milk for your coffee. You pick up your phone to call room service to bring you some — but change your mind. You’ll just have breakfast downstairs at the downstairs coffee shop. When you get there you glance at the breakfast menu. Everything looks good, but your mind is elsewhere. You decide to just grab a ready-made sandwich and a freshly ground coffee. You head to the locked, indoor storage area for your bicycle and begin your commute to work.
12:00 p.m.
On your lunch break, you remember you have dry cleaning by the door. While you’re at it, you request a room cleaning. Your sister is coming for dinner and you’d hate for her to see the place how you left it this morning.
5:30 p.m.
You left work late. Collapsing on the couch, you realise there’s not enough time to cook. At least the apartment is cleaned up, you notice. You force yourself to get up and check the fridge. There’s no food there anyway, so you call room service and ask for a delivery from the kitchen. Grilled chicken wraps and air-fried sweet potato fries. Just the way you usually order them, you say. Thirty minutes go by; your sister and the burgers arrive at almost the same time. As you take the plates to the kitchen, your sister tells you the real reason she wanted to come over: she got a job offer! You congratulate her and say drinks are in order. You decide to head upstairs to the bar for a champagne toast. You and your sister clink glasses in the lounge, replete with a full bar and panoramic views.
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Types of Hometels
In many ways, it almost seems like a stretch of sorts, or a novel idea suitable for some time in the future, but it’s not. Hometels are rising up around us today — and they’ve proven one of the most novel and creative opportunities to diversify since I started The High Street Group. No matter who you are or what you do, the beauty of hometels is that the dynamic lifestyles they allow appeal to many kinds of people.
Rising up in places like New York City, and across Germany, these community-driven, convenient living spaces are growing in popularity. They can be studio apartments or three-bedroom penthouses. The important thing is that they aren’t a hotel room or an Airbnb. They’re home with an extra layer of services, security, and luxury.
While it’s hard to pin down exactly what the hometel experience is — it can be different for everyone who chooses it — they all have something in common: a degree of flexible living that previous generations can only envy.
