Branding Downtown Pensacola’s First Full-Service, Upscale Boutique Hotel
The Challenge
How do you bring an elevated, upscale boutique hotel to a small town to serve an affluent, discerning clientele?
The Approach
Focus heavily on branding the hotel from floor to ceiling to enhance the guest experience and create a timeless, one-of-a-kind aesthetic.
A boutique hotel experience in Pensacola’s Garden District
Part of a revitalization project in Downtown Pensacola’s East Garden District, Hotel Tristan is an upscale boutique hotel that will bring big-city amenities to the heart of Pensacola by late 2026. In its earliest stages of planning, the team at Catalyst Healthcare Real Estate and The 1559 Collective approached us to help with the hotel’s branding. Named after Tristán de Luna y Arellano, the expedition leader who eventually established Pensacola as America’s first European settlement, was the inspiration behind the hotel’s namesake.
Having worked with the team at Catalyst Healthcare Real Estate, they already had a strong grasp on our brand process. This allowed us to dive even deeper, focusing on the fine details from the start.
We agreed that the brand needed to simultaneously offer a nod to Pensacola’s deep roots in European culture as well as appeal to a modern, refined clientele.
With a hotel, the brand is something you feel throughout the entirety of your stay. It’s the colors on the walls. The small touchpoints around the lobby. The words people say to you at the front desk. This brand had to be strong enough to permeate every level of the stay experience for guests.
A brand’s logo is a significant part of the visual system, no matter what. For Hotel Tristan, we knew that this logo would be everywhere from the signage to the notepads on the nightstands. It had to make an impact. It had to be memorable.
Channeling the energy and culture of de Luna’s native Spain, the bull logo represents courage and boldness. As a nod to the local geography of Pensacola, we added a flower element to the bull to represent growth and the hotel’s location in the East Garden District. Lastly, the head and horns of the bull blend together nicely into a letter “T.”
A color palette inside a hotel has the power to invoke a feeling within every guest who walks through the doors. It sets the tone and an expectation for things to come.
Earth tones and nods to traditional Spanish tiles have heavily inspired Hotel Tristan’s color palette. It features an inviting mix of warm reds and yellows blended with moody and sophisticated blues and greens that encourage guests to stay a while and immerse themselves in the culture.
We drew inspiration from the hotel’s Spanish heritage to develop a tile-inspired icon system. We incorporated geometric and tile patterns common throughout the Iberian Peninsula, creating a visual language rooted in centuries-old design traditions. These would be easily deployable on in-room materials, menus, and more to make everything unmistakably Hotel Tristan.
We also wanted to pay homage to the East Garden District–the growth and beauty of the area. To bring this to life, we developed an illustrated system of plants that are native to Pensacola. This sketched, organic system coexisted with the boldness of the patterns to create one stunning bank of visuals to pull from.
Branded lockups and locally inspired landmark icons completed the system to be used on collateral, website pages, and more.
The in-room experience at any hotel is a way to engage your guests and introduce your hotel’s brand identity.
With the brand elements in place, we wanted to get the Hotel Tristan team started off with a bang. This meant delivering plenty of requested mocks, including key card packets, stationery, door hangs, menus, toiletry kits, and more.
Additionally, we put together a preliminary mock of how the brand could start coming together digitally on their social channels.
