Beyond Sustainability: Rethinking Hospitality Design for a Circular Economy

The design industry has a problem. Hotels are stripped out and rebuilt every seven to ten years. Restaurants, every two to three. Retail interiors, sometimes in less than a year. Skip after skip is filled with materials that were perfectly serviceable, discarded because tastes shifted or a brand wanted a refresh. The cost is enormous: to the planet, to the people who made those materials, and to the businesses paying to throw them away.

Beyond Sustainability is a call to design differently - not as an act of sacrifice, but as an act of intelligence.

Drawing on fifteen years running Sibley Grove, an award-winning hospitality design studio, Jeremy Grove sets out a practical framework for a circular economy in design. Through ten clear steps - from Design for Disassembly and material health to building responsible supply chains and making the commercial case - he shows how circular thinking delivers better buildings, better businesses, and better outcomes for the people who use them.

Part memoir, part manifesto, part practical handbook, this book draws on real projects, hard-won lessons, and conversations with figures including Michael Braungart, co-author of Cradle to Cradle. It is essential reading for designers, developers, hotel operators, manufacturers, and anyone who believes the built environment can be both beautiful and good.

Look beyond sustainability. Look at what hospitality design is becoming - and at the part you can play in building it.

Jeremy Grove is an award-winning designer, and CEO of Sibley Grove, a hospitality design studio he co-founded in 2010 with his wife, Kate Sibley.He grew up on a small farm in Suffolk where his family had little financially, but the farm gave him space, nature, and an early education in resourcefulness that no university could have provided. Making do was simply how things worked; reusing what was available, understanding the seasons, and learning that the natural world gives generously but demands respect in return. Those experiences shaped how he thinks about design, sustainability, wealth, and value long before he had the language for any of them.He studied design at Goldsmiths, University of London, where he met two of the people who would go on to define his career: Kate Sibley, who would become his wife and co-founder of Sibley Grove, and Shaun East, who remains a central figure in the practice to this day. Kate went on to study at Central Saint Martins, completing an MA that introduced the Cradle to Cradle principles now at the heart of the studio's work. Sibley Grove is a business formed on family, friendship, trust, and a shared passion for design.Over fifteen years, Jeremy has designed hotels, restaurants, and bars across the UK, Europe, the Middle East, and beyond, from boutique properties and historic country house conversions to large-scale urban hotel projects. The team's work spans architectural design, interior design, and bespoke furniture, with each discipline informed by the same set of principles: quality materials, honest construction, longevity over trends, and a deep understanding of how spaces are actually built, used, and maintained over time. His brother Tim, now co-director, brings the technical rigour that turns these principles into buildable reality.Jeremy is recognised as a leading figure in sustainable hospitality design. His practice's work is grounded in the circular economy; Design for Disassembly, material health, responsible supply chains, and the commercial case for designing differently. He has spent fifteen years demonstrating that quality, environmental and social responsibility, and profitability are the same thing, not competing priorities.As a writer and speaker, he contributes to industry publications, conferences, and events on the future of hospitality design. He advises developers, operators, and brands on how to implement circular principles within their businesses. Beyond Sustainability is his first book.