Calm Tech Institute's Booth Review at Hospitality Design Expo 2026
- Amber Case
- 1 day ago
- 5 min read
HD Expo in Las Vegas is a premier event where design, innovation, and technology converge to showcase the latest trends in the hospitality industry. This year, Calm Tech Institute showed up with a question: which trade show booths actually made people feel good? Our favorite booths had key characteristics that aligned with the science behind Calm Tech Certified™ for Spaces, our newest offering for hospitality and trade show builders.
How does the design of a space affect us?
The environments we inhabit shape us more than we tend to notice.
Our brains decide whether a space is safe before we can even articulate why, our first impressions determine whether our cortisol levels rise or fall.
Ceiling height, material honesty, and visual harmony are baked into how our brains interpret a space. The neuroscience behind these responses is fascinating and real.
With that in mind, we evaluated the trade show booths not just on visuals, but how well they support the nervous system. Below were our picks, and our reasoning for each.
These awards highlight excellence in four distinct categories: Biophilia, Material, Environment, and Light. The winners were Lulu and Georgia #3065 (Environment), Williams-Sonoma, Inc. B2B #3411 (Material), Harken Design's Courtside Pavilion (Biophilia), and Kettal Group's #3055 (Light).
This post explores what made each booth exceptional and why they earned their respective awards. It also offers insights into the design elements and concepts that set them apart.
Lulu and Georgia: Environment
What: Lulu and Georgia's first HD Expo debut with a new line of Contractor-Grade furniture aimed at hotels.
A contained booth meant to feel like a cafe, L&G's booth showcased an extremely good use of a small space, with high-end furniture and cohesive design, as well as a fully decorated exterior that allowed for extra activities throughout the show. One day featured a craftsperson personalizing eye masks with a vintage Singer Sewing machine just outside of the cafe. The wait time was more than two hours at one point, as this booth goodie was in extremely high demand.
Williams-Sonoma: Material
Williams-Sonoma’s booth at HD Expo was a masterclass in the use of materials. The company focused on tactile and visual richness, combining natural woods, metals, and textiles to create a warm, inviting space.
The most important part of this booth is the linen canopy above the space, enabling better control of lighting, harmonious texture, and a sense of refuge from the harsh lights and chaos of the trade show floor.
This booth stood out because it demonstrated how material choices can influence the feel and story of a space, making it more than just a display but an experience.
Harken Design: Courtside Pavillion: Biophilia in Action
Our biophilia award went to Harken Design's Courtside Pavilion for their exceptional use of plants-based fractals.
Key elements included:
Tennis Theme surprise, with hedges with tennis balls in artificial hedges, including
Visually-engaging custom rugs providing texture and color harmony
Artificial and real plants with a density that affords calmness
Lemon and lime water station
Between presentations, ambient sounds of outdoor Tennis practice
Subtle scent of freshly cut grass
Comfortable seating areas that were cozier and larger in the front, inviting visitors to occupy the front row more than the edges and experience the content more fully.
This booth demonstrated how biophilic design could help with attention and focus in an otherwise brightly lit and chaotic trade show environment.
Kettal Group: Best use of Light
Kettal's custom lighting design overpowered the mediocre, flat, and extremely annoying trade show overhead lights by installing their own cinematic lights to illuminate their booth so it looked more like an outdoor space. This dramatically effected the experience of the booth.
While each winning booth brought a unique perspective, whether through material innovation, environmental sensitivity, biophilic connection, or lighting mastery, one booth had a huge opportunity to go one step further, which would have cemented it as the top booth of the show. Here's how:
Runner Up:
The Grand Hotel by Gensler, featuring Coast 2 Coast Furniture
On initial visit, this booth had all of the hallmarks of a standout space, but two important things were missing:
Lighting and Sound Isolation: The way the booth was facing made it prone to light pollution and to clashing show-floor sounds, sometimes conflicting with the panels on stage.
The missed opportunity here was subtle sound masking and a fabric canopy.
No canopy meant the audience was forced to stare at a grid of trade-show lights while trying to focus on the speakers. There was a missed opportunity to cover the space in a canopy, turning the entire space into a darkened retreat of moody lamps and nightlife appeal.
Sanctuary: There an opportunity for the individual booths on the edges of the space to have lower ceilings, allowing for small parties to engage in connection and socializing. This could have been the most popular booth at the show with heavy dwell time throughout the week, the booths being used for meetings between scheduled content.
What it could have been:
At the end of the show, the CTI team had dinner at Bavette's Bar & Boeuf, whose enclosed ceiling showcased the coziness of the lamp lighting and made for a completely immersive dining environment that felt more like the chain's Chicago roots than a Vegas mainstay.
The best hospitality spaces do something subtle and powerful: they lower your cortisol and help you feel at ease.
A well designed booth can provide a deep memory a trade show in the blur of frenzy. When done right, a Calm booth is a space where you can actually remember where you were, who you talked to, how you felt, and (most importantly) what you learned. All four of our awarded booths did that.
While Calm is an ideal design outcome to achieve, it's a subtle one to measure. This is exactly why we built Calm Tech Certified™ for Spaces. We've leveraged insights from neuroscience for people who need to demonstrate quality, focus, and calmness in space design. Get in touch if you're working on a space and want to put it to the test!
This year marked a special milestone as the Calm Tech Institute introduced its inaugural Best in Show Awards, recognizing four outstanding booths for their unique approaches to design and experience.
Thanks so much to HD Expo for organizing such an excellent and helpful event this year!
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