The Brand Identity – Home of the Greatest in Graphic & Brand Design
Opened in 2018, The Calile is an urban resort in Brisbane, Australia, and by 2023 its brand was firmly established, launched and protected across the hotel’s first five years by Australian design studio Studio Bland. The identity was working, so this time the brief looked inward. “We did not feel the brand needed to be renewed; rather, we wanted to deepen what it stood for and how people could experience it,” explains Catherine Malouf, Director at Calile Malouf Investments. “We saw the hotel not simply as a place to stay, but as a platform through which we could meaningfully contribute to Brisbane’s cultural life.”
Richards & Spence’s architecture had given the hotel a library, a pool at its centre, a garden on the roof, and an amphitheatre and event spaces made for gathering. Studio Bland in collaboration with communications agency New Initiative shaped a cultural programme of four recurring strands from what was already there at the hotel: Book Club, Swim Sets, Rooftop Harvest and Calile Culture. To give the programme a face, the studio designed a visual language system of sub-identities that could sit under the parent Calile brand they’d already established. “Each needed enough independence to develop its own character, audience and appeal while remaining unmistakably part of The Calile,” Malouf notes.
“We saw the brand as the sum of many parts, which meant we could move away from its most obvious DNA while still keeping the cultural programme aligned,” explains Creative Director Lucy Bland. The strands are held together by a shared sensibility, with the same finesse, quality and restraint. “There are so many levers within a brand that can be played with – photography, composition, typography, tone of voice, subject matter, audio and animation,” Bland continues. “The discipline was in choosing a few, rather than changing all of them at once, so there was always a connection back to the primary brand.” They moved away from the reflexes of hotel marketing, for example, steering clear of the heterosexual couple narrative the category leans on. “If a concept started to sound like a typical hotel, we’d stop and work out how to say the same thing through a more contemporary lens suited to an urban resort,” Bland adds.
LL Brown remained as the primary typeface, and Beausite kept a supporting place, but the programme needed a typeface of its own to become recognisable – landing on Pangram Pangram’s narrow, high-contrast serif, Editorial New. “Drawing on the condensed serifs of 1970s and 1980s advertising, but reworked with a contemporary feel, it felt like an extension to the brand’s typography system, rather than a departure from it,” details Bland.
The naming for the recurring strands focused on clarity. Worked through with New Initiative, they decided to call them exactly what they are. “They didn’t have to be clever; they needed to be recognisable and understood on sight, so a guest could read Book Club or Rooftop Harvest and know what’s on offer without a second thought,” Bland adds.
Book Club came out of the library and was introduced in-room, alongside the robe and minibar, with a new title selected each month and never repeated. Each month’s title is announced with a still-life image shot by photographer Annika Kafcaloudis and styled by Stephanie Stamatis, running as a triptych across social media, the website and a printed bookmark. “The idea was to allude to the book rather than literally illustrate it, and still-life photography lent itself perfectly to that, a small collection of inanimate objects arranged to suggest the story without spelling it out,” Bland tells us. For each title, the studio set a brief around three core objects, which Stamatis would source and interpret on set, keeping a glimpse of The Calile in a surface, colour or material.
Swim Sets is a run of listening sessions with DJ sets played poolside through the warmer months and threaded through the rest of the hotel, from the vinyl in the library to the playlists in the rooms. The studio worked with the Australasian Dance Collective, already a friend of the hotel, catching its dancers mid-movement and deliberately unidentifiable. “The point wasn’t to document a dancer,” notes Bland. “It was to let the body, motion blur and colour carry the sound, so the image evoked the feeling of the music, rather than describing it.” Rooftop Harvest, in turn, grew out from the produce garden on the roof. It’s a series of food events taking guests from a cooking demonstration on the rooftop down to an alfresco dinner in the amphitheatre, led by cooks such as Julia Busuttil Nishimura and centred on the hotel’s own harvest.
Calile Culture is the open, unfixed strand, a forum for whatever the hotel was drawn to, such as conversations, films and collaborations. It has drawn in artists, writers, curators, chefs and musicians. “All have created opportunities for our guests, team and local community to encounter creative thinking and conversation in an intimate and accessible way,” Malouf tells us.
That openness culminated in Poolside Attraction, a short film built on the friction familiar to anyone who has used a hotel pool: the fight for a sun lounger. In it, the chair does the chasing, stalking a guest who can’t shake it, feeling closer to a romantic comedy than a tourism ad. Studio Bland brought in director Scottie Cameron, whose comic touch they had admired in a Jacquemus furniture campaign. “We wanted the thing most hotels avoid,” Bland tells us, “not a literal depiction of the experience but something self-deprecating and funny, a way to tilt the lens and show the side of The Calile that’s curious, generous and playful.” The central flip, the chair doing the chasing, was Cameron’s idea, and getting it right meant closing sections of the working hotel to haul a heavy pool chair from spot to spot. By the studio’s account, the film became one of the hotel’s most successful campaigns to date, measured in ad conversions and in the organic enquiries that came, as Bland puts it, “just because someone had been made to laugh by a hotel ad.”
“The cultural programming has shifted the relationship from one that could be transactional to one that is more personal and ongoing,” Malouf explains. That connection reaches outward as well, through Stay with Purpose, an initiative that directs support from every stay and event to arts organisations and charities. For Malouf, it returns The Calile to the root of its name: “A family name derived from the Arabic word Khalil, meaning ‘friend.’”