HOTEL SLUT
SLEEP AROUND.
We spend tremendous amounts of time exploring the world. Hotel Slut grew out of the way we travel together. We stay in hotels, apartments, resorts, and places in between, and photograph the trip as it unfolds. The room when we arrive. The room after we have lived in it. The clean version. The fucked-up version. But the hotel is only half the subject. The city, the bar downstairs, the street outside, what we ate, what we brought home, what we left behind, and the life around us are the rest.
WHAT IT IS.
Hotel Slut is our photographic archive of sleeping around. Luxury hotels, cheap rooms, apartments, resorts, bars, streets, bathrooms, beds, and whatever happens around them. We are interested in the difference between the way a place presents itself and the way it feels once you actually live in it.
Hotel Slut is a joint project by Alexander Hilmy and Haley Rico.
At its simplest, Hotel Slut is a global collection of places for curious people, seen through our point of view as travelers.
Over time, we see Hotel Slut becoming more than photography: books, objects, merchandise, hotel collaborations, houses, and small hospitality projects. The identity should be strong enough to grow with all of it.
THE TRAVELER.
Alexander makes the photographs, but the experience behind them is ours. They are not meant to document a hotel comprehensively or photograph it the way the property would photograph itself. They are a record of what catches our attention while we are there.
Sometimes that is the architecture. Sometimes it is an unmade bed, the light at six in the morning, a drink downstairs, somebody crossing the room, or something completely outside the hotel.
We want the photographs to feel personal enough that you understand something about the people traveling without needing to see us in every frame.
Ideally, someone who knows the property recognizes it immediately and still gets to see something in it they may not have noticed before.
THE PHOTOGRAPHY.
Alexander was a professional photographer before HILMY, and still approaches these as photographs first. Color, light, crop, composition. No filters. No Photoshop tricks. No AI. The goal is for the images to feel observed rather than manufactured.
HOTEL SLUT: CITY
Each trip can become its own chapter: Hotel Slut: Milan, Hotel Slut: Singapore, Hotel Slut: Cairo, Hotel Slut: Porto, and so on. Not a guide and not a checklist. The room is the aperture into the rest of the city: the meal, the bar, the street, the building, the object, the person, the mistake. The point is not to tell people exactly what to do. It is to give them a glimpse into the way we experienced a place and make them want to go find their own version of it.
THE IDENTITY.
Because the name already carries the provocation, we do not need an identity that explains it. We would rather the identity act as the counterweight: smart, disciplined, premium, and a little strange. The first read should feel resolved. The second read is where the humor, tension, or discovery can live.
- 01A wordmark that can stand completely on its own
- 02A symbol or monogram only if there is actually an idea in it
- 03Typography with enough personality to become part of the identity
- 04A simple color system that does not compete with the photography
- 05A graphic behavior or device that can flex across editorial, digital, objects, and environments
- 06A system that feels equally believable on a photo book, a hotel towel, a matchbook, a website, or the side of a building
WHAT WE’D RATHER AVOID.
We would rather avoid the expected hotel language: keyholes, room numbers, beds as logos, bells, do-not-disturb tags, luggage icons, lips, pin-up girls, obvious sex symbols, retro motel cosplay, fake vintage, or an H/S monogram simply because the letters happen to be there.
THE PATH OF HOTEL SLUT.
Travel is the research, the production, and the source material.
- 01
PUBLISH
City chapters, photography, short writing, printed editions, books, subscriber material, and eventually maps or itineraries. The photography remains the reason to enter.
- 02
COLLECT
Merchandise, objects, and eventually the things people discover inside the photographs. We love hotels that have things good enough to steal: the robe, the glass, the matchbook, the pen, the towel, the book, the strange little object you keep thinking about after you leave. Hotel Slut should be able to make that kind of thing. Commerce should feel more like answering ‘where did you get that?’ than building a sales funnel.
- 03
COLLABORATE
Over time, Hotel Slut could collaborate with hotels, restaurants, developers, and brands on photography, creative direction, editions, objects, experiences, or the point of view itself. The work should remain editorial first and commercial second.
- 04
BUILD
Long term, we would like to source the investment, acquire a place, and remake it through what years of travel have taught us. A Parisian penthouse in Mexico City is the kind of tension we mean. Not imitation. Translation. Hotel Slut could move from observing places to making one.
The photograph comes first. The ability to buy, book, collect, or eventually live inside that point of view comes later.
REFERENCES.
These are saved because of the thinking, not because we want any one of them copied. We respond to identities with a second read, typography that becomes the idea, graphic systems with behavior, and objects that feel worth keeping.
THE ASK.
We are not looking to prescribe the answer. We want a design partner to take this point of view and find something we would not have gotten to on our own.
We will be involved and we will have opinions, but we also want to leave enough room for the design team to solve the problem. The best outcome is an identity that feels inevitable once we see it, but that we did not see coming.
HOTEL SLUT SHOULD FEEL EXPENSIVE ENOUGH TO GET AWAY WITH THE NAME.