When we won the bid to help Nordic Choice Hotels create a brand new hotel in the iconic old post office building in the middle of Copenhagen, we were faced with a very tall order: How do we create a hotel that is both luxurious and accessible, stylish and fun, and traditional and surprising? Brick by brick, we have helped build a new hotel concept from the ground up. We call it conscious luxury!

Brand strategy

Close your eyes and imagine a luxury hotel. Chances are you’re imagining something along the lines of plush carpeting, gold trimmings, customers only areas and extreme privacy. But is that really true nowadays? We dove deep into the world of luxury and conducted interviews with international high flyers that know luxury inside out. The result was surprising: there is a new version of luxury that goes beyond material wealth and exclusiveness. Introducing luxury 2.0 – a socially conscious take on luxury that values such scarce resources as time, peace and quiet and actual togetherness!

Timeline 

Values

Moodboard

Identity

The visual identity is rooted in contrast. The logo is a hybrid combining the style of old Europe with modernity – literally merging two contrasting typefaces that create a surprising yet coherent expression. The name – Villa Copenhagen – makes it clear that the house is an ever present character in itself even appearing in a simplified version of an architectural drawing in the logo itself. Like an oversized villa with happy and vibrant coming and goings on the ground floor and the possibility for retreat upstairs, the hotel embodies the whole spectrum of daily life in Copenhagen.

Sub brands

Luxury hotels can seem intimidating and unwelcoming. In Denmark we don’t have a long tradition of visiting hotel restaurants and bars unless we are guests. Villa Copenhagen intends to change that! By giving its line of sub brands – restaurants, bar, bakery and art gallery and shop – their own individual identities, the experience of crossing the threshold to a luxury hotel becomes a quite different experience. You are simply having a drink or grabbing a bite at a great location in the middle of the city!

Web design

Villa Copenhagen is all about the building! Not only it is huge, it is also a mixture of all kinds of experiences, functionalities and atmospheres. As a guest, you will want to spend time exploring. The same goes for the website! We have created a site that mimics the experience of arrival and exploration – always with the feeling of being guided by a friendly and informal voice. A voice, that also leads you outside the hotel to experience everything Copenhagen has to offer.
The lobby – landing page – is exciting and dynamic, whereas the sites exploring the rooms exude a sense of peace and serenity. Just like the hotel itself!

Wayfinding

Villa Copenhagen is big! With 6 floors, 390 rooms and suites, wings, several staircases, not to mention various restaurants, bar, bakery, fitness area, pool and much mure! Faced with this amount of complexity, we chose to keep it simple. Allowing oxidised brass to carry through from room interior to lobby to hallways, we have created a sense of harmony and coherence across a large and very diverse area, while maintaining a tactility and beautiful expression in the combination of brass, marble and wood.

Campaign video

What to show your audience when the whole hotel is a construction mess? We did art direction, editting and sound design for the Villa Copenhagen campaign video.

Social media

We did art direction and designed templates for the hotel’s social media content with an emphasis on well-produced stories and various fragments of the campaign video material.

Image art direction

Building on the brand values of contrast, happiness and conscious luxury, the photographic art direction relies on certain principles such as the importance of creating warm and natural images that incorporate a sense of life, movement and everyday use. Perfection and untouched rooms were discarded in favour of traces of (imperfect) human beings!

Design guide

Our comprehensive online brand guide is the ultimate user friendly guide. It contains everything from brand narrative, values, to all visual design material and guidelines and it is always up to date, which makes it easy for the hotel to onboard new employees and partners.