Check into a hotel for the night — a five-star resort or a last-minute roadside motel — and look down at your feet. Chances are you're standing on a decidedly busy, dazzling, or intricately patterned carpet. So what is it about hotels that apparently makes them so determined to break the rules of interior design in such a garishly noticeable way?
Beyond the obvious — plenty of hotels do weave their own logo or branding into a repeating design — the answer comes down to a mix of reasons, some coldly practical, some entirely about how a space feels to walk through.
On the one hand, hotel lobbies and corridors are often vast, open, or long, stretching spaces. Having a simple, plain, solid-colored carpet in such a large space could prove monotonous at one extreme, or overwhelming at the other, as the eye has nothing to latch onto when reading the space around it. Patterned carpets, ultimately, can be used to manipulate the space — giving the eye a structure and a repetitive frame of reference to better judge distance, or else to break up an otherwise overwhelming expanse of solid color. Stripes, swirls, and checks, meanwhile, can be used to make narrow corridors seem broader, or extensive corridors not quite as dauntingly long.
On the more practical side, however, hotels are understandably places of high footfall and traffic. Unlike hard surfaces such as solid wood or tile, carpet deadens the sound of guests' footsteps as they come and go at all hours — no small thing in a building full of people trying to sleep. The trade-off is durability: under that constant stream of feet, carpet wears through far faster than a hard floor ever would. This unavoidable wear and tear would obviously be much more visible on a plain carpet, and so busier, more garishly patterned designs also work to disguise how worn the floor beneath you might be.
That huge amount of footfall, of course, comes with the somewhat less pleasant bonus of an increase in staining. Hotel guests walking in from the rain and the snow, spilling drinks and snacks at the bar, or being clumsy with their room service or in-room breakfast can all cause hotel carpets to become extremely dirty extremely quickly. Just as with natural wear and tear, patterned carpets are far better equipped to hide these stains and marks than plainer carpets, making them a more advisable choice here too. Essentially, as gross as it might sound, the more garish the design, the less likely you are to see what's actually on the floor.
All told, ultimately, patterned carpets work both to subconsciously break up the open spaces of a hotel, giving our eyes a means of working out distances and spatial flow, and obscure a multitude of sins that would otherwise be much more noticeable.