A motel idea brought to northern France.

Novotel is the hotel from which the whole Accor group grew. In 1967 Paul Dubrule and Gérard Pélisson set up the Société d’investissement et d’exploitation hôteliers, or SIEH, and opened their Novotel near Lille. The New York Times, in a profile of the pair on 24 July 1990, said they started in business together that year by opening the hotel at the Lille airport. Les Echos, in a history of the group published on 29 June 2010, placed it at Lille Lesquin, the airport’s town. English Wikipedia says the concept was inspired by American motels, offering comfortable rooms, a restaurant and parking.

The company traded under the hotel’s name as it grew. English Wikipedia and Les Echos describe a run of additions in the 1970s — ibis in 1974, Mercure in 1975 and Sofitel in 1980 — made by a business known as Novotel-SIEH. Wikipedia says the group opened a Novotel in Singapore in 1981, and Les Echos records that after taking over Jacques Borel International in 1982, the Groupe Novotel SIEH–Jacques Borel International changed its name to Accor in 1983. From then on Novotel was one brand among several rather than the name of the company.

The brand also went to New York early in its international life. The New York Times reported on 18 October 1981 that Novotel, then described as a Paris-based chain, planned a hotel above an existing office building on the west side of Broadway between 51st and 52nd Streets. The project had been proposed by the architects Gruzen & Partners; the lobby was to sit on the sixth level, reached from a 52nd Street entrance, and the new floors would rise on the augmented foundations of the 1929 Broadway Block Building. The paper said Novotel already operated the Roosevelt Hotel on Madison Avenue. English Wikipedia says the company bought the Times Square building in 1984 and sold the hotel under a sale and management-back deal in 2012.

Novation rooms and a campaign of its own.

For much of the 1990s the brand spoke mainly through its parent. Tourmag reported on 4 October 2006 that Novotel had been largely silent for years under the broad umbrella of Accor’s group communication, and that it was launching a large promotional campaign of its own on 6 October 2006, presented at the Novotel in Bucharest, a hotel whose façade, the magazine said, had been rebuilt to match the theatre that previously stood on the site.

The campaign was built around design. Tourmag said the agency Young & Rubicam created the television spot and proposed the line “Novotel, designed for natural living”. Its images showed a stag, a polar bear, does and a baby seal moving through the hotel’s rooms and corridors, always in visual contact with the outdoors, set to music by the French singer Emilie Simon. The magazine said the same images were used in print advertising in France and Britain, and that the aim was to move the brand away from the image of a functional stopover between airport and business meeting toward a more personal, relaxed stay.

Behind the advertising sat a new room design. Tourmag described the Novation rooms, which it dated to 2003, as dressing all the chain’s new hotels and gradually reworking older ones, with spaces drawn by Accor’s in-house Innovation and Design unit. The magazine listed larger bathrooms taken from the old entrance corridor, a separate toilet, a glazed shower and a mobile desk on castors. Accor’s own description of the concept, published by Hotel News Resource on 15 June 2004, said the rooms had electrical outlets, tables and lighting built into the headboard, a multi-purpose “pouf” that served as luggage rack, bench or ottoman, and light, relaxing shades mixed with splashes of colour.

Later work kept the room at the centre. English Wikipedia records a prototype “Room 3120” shown with Microsoft at the Paris Vaugirard hotel in November 2011 and new “N” rooms launched in 2017. It also says the apartment-hotel brand Novotel Suites has been part of the Novotel family since 2010.

Design and documentation.

Hotel identities tend to live in many places at once. A crest or wordmark appears on the façade, the lobby signage, the key card and the doorman’s cap, and each of those surfaces asks something different of the mark: legibility from across a street, quiet presence on a pillow card, crisp reproduction when it is embroidered in thread or pressed into a wax seal. A hotel group can keep a simplified version of the mark alongside the full lockup, so that a monogram or single initial can stand in where the complete name will not fit.

Uniforms carry a large share of the visual language. Colour, cut, buttons and badges signal role as much as brand, and they often repeat the palette of the interiors. Liveried cars, shuttle buses and boats extend the same tones onto the street, where a consistent paint colour can become part of how guests recognise the property from a distance.

Room collateral is where the system is read up close: stationery, menus, door hangers, toiletry labels and in-room guides. Typography and spacing matter more here than anywhere else, because guests handle these pieces and keep some of them as souvenirs.

A founding hotel that had to find its own voice.

Until 1983 Novotel was also the name on the company. It is the founders’ own creation, yet from 1983 it sat under a parent called Accor, alongside Sofitel, Mercure and ibis. Tourmag’s 2006 report described a brand that had been largely quiet inside the group’s communication and was then given a campaign, a slogan and a visual world of its own.

That campaign is the clearest documented statement of Novotel’s identity. “Designed for natural living” tied the brand to the Novation interiors rather than to a location or a price, and Tourmag called the images of animals wandering through calm rooms very poetic. Tourmag said the images were meant to show a move from functional standardisation to a more personal feel. The same report described Novotel’s rooms as modular, with the in-house architect pushing that modularity further in a concept then on test at the CityGate hotel in Hong Kong.

Buildings have played a part too. The 1981 Broadway plan placed a lobby on the sixth level above an older office block, and the Bucharest hotel presented in 2006 rebuilt a theatre façade on its site. English Wikipedia adds that by the end of the 1990s Novotel was redefining its strategy toward city centres and launching a refurbishment programme based on design and modularity.

For a design guide, Novotel shows how a founding brand can be absorbed into a group, then reassert itself through room design and a single advertising idea, so that the name on the sign stands for a particular kind of stay. Compare it with its younger sister ibis, and with Hyatt and Hilton. For this guide we use harbour blue, garden sage and linen with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Novotel’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.