Here’s a unique travel guide for the eco-conscious non-tourists! I also highly recommend the Weird and Wonderful Guide to Barcelona, all by LeCool. If you want to borrow this, feel free to visit our library!  

When nephew (designer) and uncle (sunblind craftsman) get together, beautiful eco-friendly and local products appear! Check out El Nebot del Persianer for the kind of products we want to have in our hotel.  

Here some cool local pieces of furniture and storage solutions made from upcycled sails in Spain. By DVELAS. We want some!  

Interesting statistics regarding eco-friendly practices in hotels and b&bs, according to TripAdvisor’s 2012 Industry Index.  

Here is my report for Treehugger about assisting at the honey harvest of the roof of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in NYC! If beekeeping can be done in Hong Kong and NYC, why not Barcelona?  

Here’s what I think of the Element Hotel after staying there in New York City for a few nights…  

Nano-treated bed linens could save the average hotel more than 100 million liters of water per year. A great example of Biomimicry at work, learning from the Lotus plant how to clean without detergents. [Thanks dMASS for the tip!]  

Another locally produced eco-friendly design we can imagine in our future hotel lobby… Trepitjada by Martin Azua. Made from renewable, fully biodegradable esparto in Murcia.  

Enzo Mari’s Barcelona Manifesto from 1999 should still be followed by designers; now more than ever! “Barcelona Manifesto The utopizing tension of the origins of design must be recovered. If this is the allegory of a possible transformation, then it should reach […]

Cool 100% recycled glass products, locally produced in Valencia by La Mediterránea. They could be put to good use in our hotel!  

The Soap Flake Dispenser lets you enjoy bars of soap in a comfortable way and has a reduced impact on the environment compared to liquid soap. Today, most of the soap we use is liquid soap, which contains a lot of water. Block soap […]

What Happens To Those Little Hotel Shampoo Bottles? We believe that eliminating the use of small shampoo bottles and installing soap dispensers is not only the eco-friendliest solution, but also the most comfortable one. And bars of soap still have the lesser environmental impact […]

Here you can read Allan Chochinov’s 1000 Words: A Manifesto for Sustainable Design. Good to take into consideration when designing a hotel (or anything else).  

The Waldorf-Astoria hotel in NYC has bees on its roof! I wonder if we can do the same in Barcelona… save the bees and at the same time have fresh honey for our guests?!  

More fun, locally produced sustainable furniture from Spain we’d like to see in our hotel. These seats are by Barcelona designer Guillem Ferran, and made in Valencia.