Exploring potential impacts for early involvement of interior design in the early land development stage - Studying Taiwan Cosmos Group’s hotel development

The aim of this paper is to promote the importance of interior design during the early land development stage so that unnecessary design revisions and extra construction costs and time could be avoided. Traditionally, procedural architectural and interior conceptual design proposal is often used by developers when applying the land development permit. Due to land development financing and time pressure, this procedural design proposal often contains the brief site and floor plans, elevations, sections, and information to meet the local planning and regulation. However, after the license has been obtained, the discrepancies between submitted procedural design and actual functions are often identified by the hotel development stakeholders, hence revisions and extra costs are required. To explore the potential impacts of it, 48 semi-structured and unstructured interviews have been conducted. The process revealed how group experience helped decision-making at various stages of land development, design, construction, operation management and the potential impacts of traditional land development process. The results showed that the early involvement of interior design with hotel development and operational teams will enable an integrated design and production delivery process, a sustainable hotel development and efficient financing can then be achieved and applied to the future similar practice.