Crown Creative gives Barkhouse an identity worthy of a members’ club

Crown Creative’s identity for Barkhouse, a membership-based dog hotel and daycare on New York’s West 25th Street, opens with a wordmark that sets two typefaces against each other within the name. Conforto, a warm sans serif, carries the ‘BARK.’ Coconat, a contemporary serif, carries the ‘HOUSE.’ The split is not just a graphic flourish but a structural decision about who the brand is talking to at any given moment. “There’s something quite open and approachable in the shapes, which felt right for the dog side of the brand,” Ryan Crown, Founder of Crown Creative, tells us. “Coconat brings that confidence and elevation without being cold or overly fashion-led.” The two typefaces have enough in common to read as one, and differ enough to register as two intentional parts. The dog and the owner are being addressed at the same time, by the same brand, in the same word. A third typographic voice sits beneath the Conforto and Coconat. Grazé, a hand-drawn accent typeface, appears in tightly controlled moments – a scribbled ‘+ dog dad’ appended to a business card title, ‘sit. stay. relax’ signing off a welcome letter, and a ‘good day for a spaw day’ running above a grooming illustration. “The main typography is quite editorial and structured, so the ‘dog speak’ needed to feel more instinctive and a bit looser,” Senior Graphic Designer Brigid Johnson explains. “It appears in short, punchy moments – things like sign-offs, little bits of in-space copy, or moments where the brand is clearly speaking to the dog rather than about them.”