Interior design major gets firsthand look at designing hospitality spaces in Mexico

BGSU's Noah Kamnikar gains invaluable work and networking experience for project

By Noah Kamnikar '21
Interior design major

I studied abroad in Cabo San Lucas and Cabo San Jose, Mexico, during Bowling Green State University’s winter session in January. On this trip, we got to travel to a few different cities around the area, visiting all the local spots.

I wanted to go on this trip because I am an interior design major, and I’m very interested in designing hospitality spaces once I graduate from BGSU. We are limited to the types of projects we get to do in the studio at the University, so going on this trip and being able to design a space I’ve never designed before, I knew I had to jump on that opportunity. This trip was the perfect opportunity for me to study resort design, while we stayed in beautiful resorts. Studying in such a tourist-populated area really helped understand the type of people and resorts we needed to design for our project.

I learned that there is a lot of planning that goes into designing an entire resort. There are so many little aspects to resorts that you wouldn’t necessarily think about until you start to design one from the ground up. It was really nice to learn to design a resort, while being at one. It made it so much easier when it came time to planning out areas like the lobby, concierge and other areas in a resort you may not think about until you’re in one. This helped a lot because we had the chance to walk around the resort, take the measurements we needed and go back to work on that room.

We did so many great things while in Mexico, that it’s hard to choose just one thing that was my favorite. During class, we got to take a look at some of the other resorts around the area that all had different styles, which was a great thing to experience to help give us a better understanding of what style we wanted to use on our resort design. We also took one day to go visit two different tile shops in the area. This was a unique experience because we got to see locally sourced tile that we could use in our project.

Outside of the classroom, we had a lot of fun. My favorite activity was swimming with whale sharks. This has been something that has been on my bucket list for a very long time, so to finally get to cross that off was pretty cool! We also got to go four-wheeling through the desert and along the beach, which was also an exciting experience.

Our group consisted of 10 students from BGSU with a mixture of interior design, architecture and construction management majors.

Winter session was a great way to make friends at BGSU who are studying similar things, as well as network within the community of design to bring us all together.