Hospitality carries a trace of hostility within it. The Latin hospes, both host and guest, shares its root with hostis, a word that first meant "stranger" and later came to mean "enemy," a tension Derrida captured in his coinage hostipitality.
To welcome someone is to open the door to the unknown, holding generosity and wariness in the same gesture.
This talk reads hospitality design from within that ambiguity. When we travel, we are all strangers, carrying fragments of the familiar into unfamiliar rooms and hoping to be received.
The hotel, the inn, and the guesthouse become places where this old tension is negotiated through architecture: thresholds and courtyards, light and material, the careful staging of privacy and encounter.
At its best, hospitality design does not erase our strangeness. It shelters it, offering the traveler not a replica of home but the rarer experience of being at home while remaining a stranger.
