CONTEXT AND BRIEF
The owners of El Santo were opening a boutique hotel two years later. They came back. The brief was to build something that felt like it had always been there.
Boutique 50 is a 10-room boutique hotel at 50 Bentinck Street in Glasgow's West End, a quiet residential street in Finnieston, steps from the city's best restaurants and bars.
The owners knew what a brand built with intention could do for a hospitality business. They wanted a visual identity that felt considered and permanent, as if Boutique 50 had always existed on that street.
Glasgow's West End boutique hotel market sits between two distinct competitors. At one end, the international chain hotels near the city centre with their predictable visual language and loyalty programme marketing.
At the other, a scattering of independent guesthouses with no consistent brand presence at all. The gap in the middle, a genuinely designed, independently owned boutique property with the visual confidence to justify £106 to £138 per night, was exactly where Boutique 50 was positioning itself. The brief was to build that confidence from the ground up.
No existing identity, no previous visual assets, nothing to inherit or evolve. A name, an address, and a set of values.
Client
Boutique 50
Industry
Hospitality – B2C · Hotel
Year
2020
Role
Brand Identity Designer
Duration
3 months
PROBLEM DEFINITION
A boutique hotel at this price point is asking guests to choose character over convenience. The brand had to make that choice feel obvious before they ever arrived at the door.
The boutique hotel category in Glasgow had a perception problem that worked in both directions. Independent properties were often assumed to be charming but inconsistent, a gamble rather than a guarantee.
Chain hotels offered predictability but no character. Boutique 50 needed to occupy the narrow space where both of those objections dissolve: independently owned but with the visual rigour that signals professional operation, deeply rooted in Glasgow's West End character but with the contemporary polish that justifies the nightly rate.
PROCESS AND EXPLORATION
The name did most of the strategic work before the design process began. Boutique 50 contains everything the brand needs to say: scale, address, and category, all in two words.
The design had to honour that directness rather than layer meaning on top of it. An ornate crest or a decorative symbol would have been dishonest to a name that simple. The mark needed to be as clean and precise as the name itself. Three directions were explored.
The first treated the number 50 as the primary visual element, a bold geometric mark with the word Boutique set as a refined secondary element below. Strong, but it read more like a nightclub than a hotel.
The second explored a classic serif wordmark with a small architectural ornament derived from the Victorian building's ironwork detail. The warmth was right but the execution pulled too historical.
The third resolved it: a contemporary serif logotype with just enough weight to feel confident at hotel signage scale, paired with a minimal crown-like architectural motif that referenced the building without illustrating it.
The colour system was built to work across every surface the brand would touch, from the embossed letterhead to the Instagram grid to the room key card. Deep slate navy as the primary, warm cream as the ground, and a single gold accent used with enough restraint to feel earned rather than expected. Nothing in the palette signals budget. Everything signals intention.
Typography followed the same logic. A contemporary geometric serif for the wordmark and headings, clean enough for digital and authoritative enough for print. A minimal sans-serif for body copy across all collateral. Two typefaces, both doing exactly one job each.
Chose to let the name carry the identity rather than decorating it. Boutique 50 says everything it needs to say. The design's job was to make that legible at every scale, not to add meaning that was already there.
The boutique hotel category in Glasgow had a perception problem that worked in both directions. Independent properties were often assumed to be charming but inconsistent, a gamble rather than a guarantee.
Chain hotels offered predictability but no character. Boutique 50 needed to occupy the narrow space where both of those objections dissolve: independently owned but with the visual rigour that signals professional operation, deeply rooted in Glasgow's West End character but with the contemporary polish that justifies the nightly rate.
A complete brand identity built from nothing for one of Glasgow's West End boutique hotels. Contemporary serif logotype with a minimal architectural mark. Deep slate navy, warm cream, and restrained gold across every touchpoint.
Applied to stationery, room collateral, social media templates, brand guidelines, and environmental signage. A visual system designed to feel like it had always belonged to that building on that street, because the best hotel brands do not feel designed. They feel discovered.
Average guest review score across Google and Booking.com within the first year
4.8 / 5
Instagram followers within the first 8 months, with consistent brand-led content from launch
2,200+
Average occupancy rate in the first full operating year, (Glasgow average 62%)
78%
