Inside the secret laboratory where Marriott is cooking up the hotel of the future

As anyone who's pulled off the interstate late at night knows, hotels like Marriott, Residence Inn, Sheraton, and Aloft are frequently neighbors, lined up side by side on the outskirts of town. It's less usual to see them side by side in a basement in Bethesda, Maryland, though. Yet two stories below Marriott International's sprawling headquarters, they do just that.

The Innovation Lab's origin story goes something like this: Years ago, an employee accidentally locked himself in the basement of Marriott's sprawling headquarters. Looking for an escape route, he poked his head through a ceiling tile and realized the space was twice as tall as he thought. "Later, he realized the potential of what he had found, and came up with the idea that started the beginning of our future," says Aliya Khan, the company's vice president for global design strategies.

The result of the employee's accidental discovery of free space is the 10,000-square foot Innovation Lab-a maze of rooms, each a perfect replica of where you will eventually drop your weary head after a day on the road. "Originally we had a series of model rooms offsite, but they were quite far and proved challenging to place new product or test things out as part of an everyday design evolution," says Khan. "In time, those model rooms moved to Marriott HQ, but it still lacked the white space in which our teams could test out innovations quickly and informally, hence the birth of the Underground!" The so-called Underground innovation lab feels a bit like a life-sized dollhouse, but it's where designers and architects work to create the hotel room of the future across the company's brands.