Taken from the French word to describe a “small, specialised shop”, the term “boutique hotel” was first coined in 1980s New York, allegedly by hotel guru Ian Schrager. Fast forward a few decades, and any hotel that has just updated its bathroom sinks or added a new CD to its lobby playlist seems keen to rebrand to get on the boutique bandwagon.

And so, almost 30 years after its invention, the question remains – what, exactly, is a boutique hotel?

Some would say that the defining characteristic of a boutique hotel, just like its fashion store namesake, should be that it is small. Wikipedia places the room count of a boutique hotel between three and 50 rooms, and i-escape.com puts the limit at 150 rooms in urban settings.

How, then, can the Mina A’ Salam at Madinat Jumeirah classify itself as a boutique hotel, when it counts 292 rooms and 44 restaurants? Surely this is equivalent to calling Starbucks a local, family-run coffee shop?!

The clue might be in the fact that the hotel is independently owned, another important criteria in the quest to be boutique. Multinational hotel chains have tried (and failed) to play the boutique game, Starwood being the most high profile example to hand. With their W Hotels, the global group tried to create a quirkier, edgier, more personal experience and succeeded to a certain extent, but ultimately the uniformity remains; even if it’s hip uniformity.

James Lohan, co-founder of Mr & Mrs Smith, says that for him, “the best boutique hotels are small, individually-owned and push boundaries. They have genuine integrity and create trends rather than following them. Entrepreneurial owner-managers can be more adventurous, so their creations tend to be highly individualised rather than corporate led.”

The idea is that each boutique hotel worth its salt should be different from the next. In some cases, the same hotel is different from one year to the next (case in point Québec’s Ice Hotel, which is built from scratch each year with the new snows). And indeed each room of a boutique hotel is often different from its neighbour.

The emphasis is also on the personal – the (24-hour) staff call guests by their first name, prepare a personalised playlist for each room’s iPod and know what different design books to leave out on the coffee table. It’s the “home-away-from-home” concept, taken to the next level.

Which brings us to décor. The boutique hotel must be stylish. This is non-negotiable. The only thing stopping Aunt Gladys from renting out her spare room (which is both small and independently owned, not to mention personal) and calling it a boutique hotel, is that it doesn’t include an Eames chair and a piece of contemporary art commissioned especially for the space. This is not to say that each room must include celebrated design icons (in fact this is the realm of the design hotel), but each boutique hotel room should have a personality and an edge that creates a treat for the traveller weary of magnolia and chrome blandness.

And perhaps these personalised touches will lead the way for the future of boutique hotels, allowing them to add the idea of the shop to their name, in addition to size – what better way to become a “boutique” than to sell the very items you display as being of good taste? And what better way for the design savvy to test out the latest lamps and chairs than to live among them for a day or two?

“The perfect boutique hotel not only has to have an unmatched service and ambience and hit the right style notes, it has to tick the ‘certain something’ box and have thoughtful and unique extras that make the stay memorable for all the right reasons,” adds Lohan.