KADO

KADO is a seven room house with a tea room on the ground floor. The work covered the mark, the printed pieces a guest actually handles, and the booking surfaces that carry someone from a search result to the front door.

Brief

The house had been trading on photography. Every listing platform flattened it into the same warm interior shot, and nothing carried from the screen into the room. They asked for a form that could hold at twelve millimetres on a wooden key tag and at full width on a display.

Approach

We began at the doorway rather than the logo. The corner of a shoji frame, the turn of a corridor, the fixed proportion of the alcove. The mark is a rectangle with one corner turned, drawn on the same two hundred unit grid as every other mark in this system, so anyone in the studio can rebuild it without opening a file.

System

Two weights of one serif, an off white, an ink. Nothing else. That restraint is what lets the room photography carry the colour.

• A mark that holds at twelve millimetres and at full screen width

• Key tags, menu, correspondence and packaging

• A booking flow that keeps the rhythm of the printed pieces

• Signage drawings the joiner could work from directly

Outcome

The identity went into use in spring. The tea room now reads as part of the house rather than a separate business, and the front of house team sets a table without asking which template to follow.