What should I consider when designing and building a space?

Where it was once considered a fringe aspect of the holiday market, the kind of peace in nature that Canopy & Stars has always offered has become big business. 

 Professional build companies providing prefab units are making it easy for big players to open new sites in seconds, but at the cost of individuality and character.  

Competing with these high-budget operations is about bringing something personal and scroll-stopping to your space, with unique, tailored design. If you can throw in something that captures the wellness market too, you should do well.  

Here's a little more about the challenges and opportunities presented by the design of a space in the current market.

Our design specialist friends at Crown & Canopy have been carefully monitoring the explosion of luxury hotels and historic estates expanding their capacity by installing high-end, cabins, treehouses, and shepherd’s huts, where previously they might have gone with more basic glamping pods.  

The attraction is obvious, with short installation times, minimal impact and infrastructure work, as well as good environmental credentials. If it's cabins or building a new wing of a hotel, it's an easy choice.

Crown & Canopy know that bespoke design will always trump a prefab space. They work with their clients to tailor spaces to the site, not just position them within it. There are plenty of advantages to doing so, all feeding back into the things we know our guests look for. Take a look at some of their previous work. 

A bespoke design allows you to craft a space to suit your land, lifestyle and financial constraints, controlling everything from the size and type of the rooms to the angle of the windows. It gives you the freedom to consider who will come to stay and what they might need and want, from storage for muddy bikes to a fairy-lit hot tub island.  

You can also incorporate local materials, giving the space a real sense of place, something which guests really pick up on. Your unique design is what will stick in people's minds, what will bring them back and what will make them tell people about you. What's more, Crown & Canopy have recently been granted a planning exemption license, which allows them to more easily facilitate the build of brand new spaces on suitable land.

Sometimes, it will just make makes sense to duplicate the same design across your site. It might even be a feature of your brand, so you need to look at other ways of introducing individuality and differentiation.  

To help owners do this, we launched a project we called Elevate. The focus was on enhancing the interior design quality at some of our spaces, in partnership with owners, because we knew how crucial it was for a space to be eye-catching .  

The results are definitive proof that people are looking for more than somewhere to sleep, or even get closer to nature. The space is a much more fundamental part of the experience than it has ever been before.

We use our knowledge of our audience and our years of experience assessing spaces to guide owners in a redesign of their space's interior styling, splitting the cost because we're so sure of the increase in revenue.  

We look at ways to make the most of the natural features and quirks of a property, incorporate local art and crafts, and give spaces a feeling of quality and character.   

Crucially, we also help with the photography of the new space.

Places that invested in interiors and new professional photography in 2025 saw an average 30% uplift in bookings, 32% uplift in revenue and 80% uplift in booking conversion after 12 months, compared with the previous 12 months. It's that simple. 

 In many ways, interiors are a better chance to stand out than the design of the space itself. It's easier to do something fun with art and fabric than it is to build a five-storey treehouse, after all. In a market that is becoming ever more design-led and competitive, individuality, character and a sense of place are the real differentiators. Style is now part of the product, not an add-on.

Our findings from Elevate confirmed the importance of interior design to business success but there's another experiential aspect of spaces that we've been talking about for a few years now – wellness.  

Wellness is still huge, but it's less about offering therapies and massages and more about something more hands-off. In Hilton’s 2027 research, 76% of UK travellers said fresh air and time outdoors are key to how they relax, while 40% rated having gardens as an accommodation priority, beating out swimming pools, which sat at 33%. 

While that might make it seem that simply being a space in nature is enough, data about the uplift in revenue after the addition of saunas and hot tubs shows you exactly how powerful adding a facility to capitalise on the trend can be.  

Looking at our 2025 booking data, spaces with at least one wellness-style facility earned around £10k more on average than those without. Outdoor baths showed the biggest single uplift, outperforming others those with no wellness-style facilities by £14k. Hot tubs gave a £10k bounce and a private sauna and outdoor bath together resulted in a jump of £19.4k. Saunas on their own only generated just over £800 in increased revenue but these are more recent as a common addition, so we expect that to rise a little.

Of course, this data comes with some caveats. The performance of outdoor baths was influenced by a handful of high-performing treehouses, while the prevalance of shared saunas may also have reduced their apparent impact. 

In short though, an interior overhaul and the addition of some kind of wellness provision combined could do wonders for your performance in 2027, and at far lower cost than building something new. 

Sources: Hilton Research 2027 | 2025/6 booking data from Canopy & Stars

Something else we expect to see a lot of in the coming years is the repurposing of farm buildings, which is a great opportunity fuelled by two things.  

Firstly, the slide from glamping into the more general idea of holidays that get you closer to nature and the simple life means that things like barn conversions, if done well, now feel a perfect fit for the market.  

The second thing is a change to rural planning regulations and the National Planning Policy Framework. The changes encourage farms to diversify, not only making it easier to add new spaces to farmland but also allowing greater freedom for change of use.  

We'll report on it next year, but stone buildings could well be the next big thing in the outdoors!