INTERVIEW With more than 60 years of experience in creating onboard spaces for various clients, De Jorio Design has long been a leading player within the cruise ship interior sector. However, the firm has now begun expanding into the fields of hotel and residential design, transferring the expertise it has developed in the cruise sector into its new endeavours. “We’re working in a very similar way to how we design for the passenger shipping sector,” says Marco De Jorio, CEO of De Jorio Design. “We’re working with the same contractors, and the level of comfort we aim to deliver in our temporary living residences is not dissimilar to what you would expect to see in most modern cruise ships. That enables us to use our experience in the cruise sector to guide us in our projects in the residential and hotel sectors, and vice versa.” De Jorio suggests the new ways of working his firm is learning while completing onshore projects could bring benefits to its onboard ones as well. “It’s given us a different perspective on the relationship between the customer and the end user of a space,” says De Jorio. “In a cruise ship project where our customer is the cruise ship owner, there are multiple layers and filters between us and the end user, namely the guest. In our residential projects, meanwhile, the customer is frequently the same person who is going to be using the spaces we create. Sharing our vision directly with the end user gives us a great opportunity to understand what people want from our designs, and we can use that experience within our cruise projects in the future.” De Jorio Design is using this experience and expertise in one of its latest cruise projects, Explora Journey’s Explora III. The ship is set to be larger than its predecessors in Explora’s fleet, as well as the first to operate using LNG fuel. De Jorio Design is therefore significantly redesigning certain areas onboard the ship, such as the lobby and top-deck Sky Bar. “The changes to the interior spaces are being made in response to the different architecture of the ship as well as feedback we’ve received,” says De Jorio. “For example, the changes we’ve made to the lobby are intended to make the space easier to walk through, while also adding a few more corners such as a library. These updates should make the ship quite a different experience for guests while maintaining the same level of quality.” “ Sharing our vision directly with the end user gives us a great opportunity to understand what people want from our designs” Marco De Jorio tells Alex Smith how De Jorio Group’s expansion into land-based design could influence and benefit its approach to cruise ship projects Stepping onshore 166 De Jorio Design’s experiences in its residential product are feeding back into its cruise interior design, says Marco De Jorio Photo: De Jorio Design
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