How Studio Roses made a hotel feel like part of its neighbourhood — The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design

Terreno Barrio Hotel is hospitality group Piñero’s first urban hotel in Palma, Spain. Mallorca-based branding and graphic design studio Studio Roses was brought in early on to develop the hospitality concept itself through the strategy, naming and identity, and on to the tone of voice, brand architecture and signage. The brief asked what could be made from the character of El Terreno, the neighbourhood the site sits in.

Studio Roses began with a question rather than a proposal: whether another hotel was needed at all. What it arrived at was a barrio hotel. Barrio is the Spanish for neighbourhood. The model runs in both directions – the hotel was to become part of the neighbourhood rather than simply occupy a building in it, and the neighbourhood was to carry on through the hotel’s site. El Terreno has also been Piñero’s own neighbourhood for more than 40 years, being where its offices are based. “We asked Studio Roses to explore what we could create from the identity and particular character of El Terreno,” the group’s Owner Lidia Piñero tells us. “We knew we didn’t want to create simply another hotel in Palma, but something genuinely connected to a neighbourhood with an extraordinary history and personality.”

The starting point had come from creative consultant José Taltavull, who was living in the neighbourhood at the time. “Terreno started with an initial idea I had been discussing with the owners: the idea of a hotel built around a broader notion of circularity – not simply environmental, but social, cultural and economic,” he explains. “The idea was for the hotel to become part of the neighbourhood, with its life, culture and economy becoming part of the project, too. From there, Studio Roses and I began a collaborative process to develop and articulate that initial thinking into a conceptual framework for the project. The barrio concept emerged from that evolution.” That thinking also became the brief for the architecture. Mallorca-based architects OHLAB, led by Paloma Hernaiz and Jaime Oliver, split the hotel into two volumes, one a protected historic building and the other new construction, and cut a public passage between them through what had been its private ground.

El Terreno had its golden age between the 1950s and the 1970s, when Palma went out at night in the bars stacked up the hillside and on the terraces above the bay. Much of that era’s lettering and print has survived in plain sight: hand-made lightboxes, old posters and tickets, neon signs and shopfronts that have not changed. The studio treated what was left as source material for the identity, working through books and historical documentation and through photographs Taltavull had taken of the neighbourhood’s old signs. “The graphic history was already there, on the street and in the neighbours’ memory,” Studio Roses’ Founder & Creative Director Rafa Roses tells us. “Our job was not to invent a visual world for the hotel, but to know what to pick up.” Roses also has a personal connection to the neighbourhood: his grandfather, Pepe Roses, created Barbarella, which became an icon of European nightlife in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The family’s archive of photographs from those years became another source for the research.

Terreno was never designed to have one logotype. It was conceived from the start as a multiple identity, on the reasoning that a neighbourhood carrying this many layers could not be defined by a single mark. There is a main wordmark, for the moments when the hotel has to appear as one recognisable brand, which lettering artist Ellmer Stefan drew from references that the studio had picked for their expressive, gestural, human and less typographic quality. Around it sits a family of wordmarks, Terreno always the dominant element and each one drawing on a different layer of the neighbourhood’s graphic memory. They appear together across the identity, including in the opening sequence of the website. Four main typefaces – Monument Extended, Blitz Script, Tiempos Text and Central Avenue – run across the system in different combinations, shifting the tone while the graphic language stays shared. “The logotypes don’t necessarily look alike, and that is intentional,” Roses notes. “What connects them is their provenance: they all come, directly or indirectly, from the graphic memory of the same neighbourhood. The coherence comes from the place rather than from imposing a single visual style.”

Some of those personalities then extend into the hotel’s individual outlets. The brand architecture was already part of the thinking when Studio Roses developed its initial strategy, and the studio wanted the venues to answer things missing from the neighbourhood as well as serve the hotel. Sala Terreno, the screening room, came partly from there being no cinema in El Terreno, and it can host talks and other cultural programming alongside films. Most of the spaces were deliberately given plain descriptive names tied to Terreno – El Terrado is simply the Spanish for a rooftop terrace – so that not every one of them became an independent branded concept.

Two of them took much greater independence. Destape, the main restaurant, was conceived as a public-facing destination that could live beyond the hotel, so it has a typographic language of its own in ABC Synt Medium and Book, with Monument Extended as the link back to the rest of the system, and a logotype drawn in two halves. “El Destape describes the period following Franco’s dictatorship when Spanish society began to open up: tourism was growing, social attitudes were changing, and there was a new sense of personal and sexual freedom. El Terreno was very much part of that moment,” Studio Roses’ Senior Designer Adrià Sánchez details. “But we didn’t want the identity to become a nostalgic recreation of that period. We were equally interested in the literal meaning of destapar: to uncover, reveal or open something up. That gave the name another layer connected to transparency, honesty and allowing people to see what lies behind the surface.” The halves can sit together, come apart or open up to hold images, messages and other graphic content between them, so the mark can act as a frame rather than always being the main element.

Dos Rombos, the hotel’s speakeasy, sits one floor below Destape – where the evening goes after dinner. Its name comes from the two-diamond symbol that Spanish television once used to mark content for adults – a warning that turned into something closer to an invitation. Dos Rombos’ identity takes the symbol literally: the two diamonds are the logo, and the name does not appear alongside them. The two have identities of their own and still sit inside the same cultural territory as the hotel.

The signage was where the barrio could come inside the building. The identity had been drawn out of the graphic language on El Terreno’s streets, and the signs were how that language became part of the physical space rather than something applied to the architecture at the end, so the studio kept the eclecticism of the neighbourhood’s own signs instead of installing one corporate system. But Terreno is a complex site to signpost. The site has two radically different buildings, one listed and one newly built, public and hotel-only areas, a rooftop open to non-guests, and a car park accessible only through the new construction. Senior Designer Nicolás Aguirre led the work. “Once that functional layer was resolved, we could deliberately introduce different formats – neon, painted signs, lightboxes and other typologies – without compromising orientation,” he notes. “In a way, we wanted to de-corporatise the signage.”

Before the hotel opened, Terreno had deliberately said little beyond an initial press announcement. Its first real piece of communication was a large-scale billboard that published a letter to the people of El Terreno, setting out what kind of hotel it wanted to be – not only a place for guests but a meeting point for the neighbourhood, somewhere to eat, stay, listen to music, watch films, enjoy art and spend time. The local press picked up the letter, which generated quite a lot of conversation around the project. “If the whole premise of a Barrio Hotel was that Terreno should become part of El Terreno rather than simply occupy a building within it, it felt natural that its first public gesture should be a direct conversation with its neighbours,” Roses explains. The letter ended: “We don’t want to be another hotel. We want to be part of El Terreno.”

“Neighbours come for coffee, lunch or dinner, meet friends, attend an event or simply walk through the passage between the two buildings,” Hotel Director Nabil Aguilera tells us of the period since Terreno opened. “Some people use it as part of their everyday route, without necessarily thinking of it as entering a hotel.”