Guest experiences, ready or made for you
Run one of the studio's six in your own property, or have one designed for your place and your guest.
Kulachka Studio — Sensory Design and Ayurveda for hospitality
The art and science of how a stay feels.
We design how a guest feels in a space, from the first 600 seconds inside the door to the quiet of the second morning.
Every guest arrives a little undone.
They have been in airports and in cars, packing the night before, feeling along an unfamiliar wall for the light switch. They walk in tired, a little cold and a little on guard, wanting to rest and not yet able to. Ayurveda reads that state as Vata raised, the quality of air and movement, and it settles with its opposites: weight, warmth, quiet and something warm to eat or drink.
So the first minutes are designed before the guest arrives: what they smell when the door opens, what their hands find, what the light tells the body, what sound meets them, and one small warm thing that says someone thought about them before they came.
Done well, a guest exhales before they can say why. That exhale is what we design.
The Sensory Hierarchy
Five senses, in the order to spend on them
Scent reaches feeling and memory before thought, so it comes first; taste, the small gift a guest remembers, comes last. Each opens its page of the method.
Listen to the room
A rainy evening in the One-Room: the record player, the clock, the incense. Still until you press play.
What guests noticed
…the coldest, unbelievably good well water I've ever had; a wood stove roaring in the commons area…
While we know there were other guests, the room and attention we received made it feel like we were the only ones there.
My almost 10-year old daughter didn't even turn on her tablet for the entire weekend!
Written by guests of the Pump House, the inn in the Poconos where the method was tested.
The Kulachka Framework
We design the space, build the systems that repeat it, and the feeling is what the guest keeps.
- The Space
- Scent, light, texture, sound and warmth, arranged to carry a guest from alert to at ease.
- The Systems
- The shopping list, the guest card, the messages and the setup steps, so the same welcome lands every stay, whether you are there or not.
- The Feeling
- Wellness, received. What a guest carries home.
Where the method was tested
The Pump House
Svetlana and Jon's sixteen-room inn in the Poconos, reopened in 2023, where the spaces and experiences on this site were first made and tested on guests. It grew on organic marketing and word of mouth.
- #1top-rated in its region on Google, within six monthsGoogle
- 4.9on GoogleGoogle
- 9.2on Booking.comBooking.com
- 300+five-star reviewsGoogle, Booking.com and Airbnb
Two ways to work with the studio
On-site, by conversation first
We stay as your guests do, then build the experience in place and hand it back running.
Kulachka Studio is led by Svetlana Hanover, a host since 2010, who has learned the craft from some two hundred thousand guests and four hundred stays of her own. She delivers every service herself. On site she comes with Jon, the studio's music sommelier and the Pump House's former executive chef, and Dr. Robert, the cat.
Featured on WFMZ 69 and The Fearless Investor, with regional coverage across FOX, NBC, ABC and Google.
- 200,000guests hosted across 25 rentals
- 2010hosting since
- 2014Certified Ayurvedic Educator
- Sensory Designcreator of the Kulachka Framework
Philadelphia, PA · 65 countries traveled
On STR Nexus
The free workspace, and two experiences free in it.
The studio's six guest experiences are taught step by step in a free workspace on STR Nexus: why the evening works, then how to deliver it, with the shopping list, the guest card, the messages and the setup steps your cleaner can tick. Fondue for Two and The Charcuterie Board are free whole. Beside them sit the house guides, guest messages and property folders a stay runs on.
Free to use, with no ads.
Begin at your own door.
Tonight, after dark, stand outside your front door with a bag in your hand. Open it the way a guest does at the end of a long day, and notice the first thing you smell, the first thing your hand finds, what the light does to your shoulders. Whatever you notice first is where to begin.
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