VR NIGHT TRAIN – Interior design, service design, insight, foresight
A train cabin like a hotel room
The business target
How to make traveling by night more appealing than flying and understand the behaviour of future customers
As the enthusiasm for night train travel continues to grow, Finland’s national railway company VR is taking the comfort of sleeper cabins to a whole new level. Kuudes worked as their design partner, turning customer insights into tangible interior designs that stand the test of time through a multitude of foresight and service design methods. The result is serene and elegant – a train cabin like a hotel room.
Insights
To re-design traveling by night train, we used a multiphase design process to discover both the real-life challenges with the current trains and even imaginative dreams for the future of train travel. By including the staff and customers in every step of the process, we could test out every solution and get fantastic feedback for perfecting the design.
Our solution
Like a night in a hotel
To become more popular, overnight train travel experience should become as desirable and comfortable as a night in a hotel. The passengers expect to get into a holiday mood as they hop on the train. Adding luxury elements and improving the aesthetics will get the travelers into the right atmosphere. The interior design took into account VR’s new look, softened the world of colours and materials, and developed more flexible and practical furniture to accommodate different needs passengers may have. After Kuudes design work is completed, VR continues the implementation work of the cabins with the selected manufacturer Skoda – who will meticulously follow our insight-driven interior design work. You can board these new night trains in 2025.
Results
“Kuudes has been an irreplaceable partner for insight-driven interior design during our long-standing cooperation. We have enjoyed the close relationship with their team as well as their flexible and iterative approach. Kuudes has high-level service design and interior design know-how which translates into uncompromising design quality. Without Kuudes, we wouldn’t have enabled such a rich and versatile integration of the passengers’ and personnel’s voice into our project.”
Ilari Hokkanen,
Manager, Strategic Projects
VR Group
The first phase sketch of the two-person cabin.
All cabins include a private toilet, according to a wish many passengers had.
