Cau
A concept identity for a boutique hotel in Girona's Old Town
Cau is a speculative brand exploration: a fictional 16-room boutique hotel in Girona's historic centre, designed to demonstrate what we'd build for a real client in this category. The work isn't a paid engagement. It's our answer to the question of what a hotel brand could look like when treated with the reverence of a printed book, rather than the logic of a corporate template.
The name means “hideaway” in Catalan: a small, intimate refuge. The visual system draws from Catalan modernism, slow craft, and the material vocabulary of old print shops. Typography is serif throughout. The voice is warm but precise. The materials are from another time, treated with hands from this one.
Why we made it
Cau is a speculative identity for a sixteen-room boutique hotel in Girona's Barri Vell. Small hotels in historic centres are usually the most characterful properties in a city and the most poorly branded — the building is four hundred years old and the brand is a template bought in an afternoon. We built Cau to show the alternative.
The thinking
The name means “hideaway” in Catalan, and the brand is built around that idea of a small refuge inside a dense old town. The visual system draws on Catalan modernism, slow craft, and the material vocabulary of old print shops: serif typography throughout, warm paper stocks, ink that looks pressed rather than printed.
The voice is warm but precise. A sixteen-room hotel cannot compete on facilities, so it competes on specificity — knowing exactly what it is, and saying so in fewer words than its competitors.
What the brand book covers
Brand positioning and tone, logotype and marks, the typographic and colour system, photographic direction, and applications across print and in-room collateral, signage, and the digital surfaces a guest meets before arriving.
For a real hotel client the same work continues into the booking journey: a direct-booking website connected to the property management system, and the interior and architectural photography the site depends on.