The weird and wonderful world of hotel carpets

Consider the carpet. In all likelihood, you usually don’t. It’s simply something beneath your feet, soft or scratchy, bright or beige, thick or thin. But in a new book, Bill Young asks you to pause and really look at a particular genre of floor-padding: the carpets in the hotels around the world. In Hotel Carpets, the long-neglected designs pop from the pages.

Young, a corporate pilot, would often send pictures of hotel carpets to his wife and daughter while he was travelling. ‘Because I spend most of my life in hotels, that’s just one thing that was sticking out,’ Young says, in a video interview from his home in Dallas, where he’s been mostly grounded of late, due to the pandemic. ‘It’s one of those things where if you don’t notice something, you don’t really think about it, but once you start noticing, you see them everywhere.’

He began to document these on an Instagram account, @myhotelcarpet, which he estimated had about 80 followers for two years. Then, in 2017, his daughter posted on Twitter that all she wanted for Christmas was for the account to go viral. It did. Young gained hundreds of thousands of followers almost overnight, something he attributes in part to people seeking relief from ‘a negative news cycle’. He kept posting as he flew around the world, staying in hotels that ranged from the Marriott in Nagoya, Japan, to the Canyon Creek Country Club in Richardson, Texas. (‘I’ve spent five years of my life in Marriotts over the last decade,’ he says.) Young was even invited with his wife and daughter to Marriott headquarters to play a small role in their design process for a new carpet in a hotel located in Austin. This improbable trajectory has now led to a book, published by Hoxton Mini Press, that collects photos of the patterns Young has taken over the years into what he calls a ‘coffee-table carpet book.’