Enveloped in soft elegance: Grotesk Studio’s identity for Emerald Stay speaks in the brand’s voice

Emerald Stay is where you’d go to find quiet, luxurious, tucked-away spaces to spend your holidays in. The luxury holiday home rental agency began renting high-end ski chalets throughout the Alps and has now begun expanding to coastal locations in Europe. To ring in this growth, the brand collaborated with the London-based Grotesk Studio to create an identity. “As part of our strategic work, we defined their brand promise to ‘Experience the Luxury of Space’,” Co-founder & Creative Director Kieran Edwards explains, ensuring a sense of calm and serenity across the brand, akin to the hotel’s primary residency in the Swiss Alps, taking cues from the creative spaces over the aesthetics of more traditional hospitality and the expected modernist approach given to Swiss brands. “Instead, we wanted to make sure the character of the brand and the experiences they offer shone through,” he details, contextualising, “a key facet of the brand is the desire of the founders Maxime and Laurent to capture the ‘art de vivre’ of unique lived moments,” championing a sense of humanity and authenticity in equal measure. This sensitivity led Grotesk Studio to the paintings of Yves Klein, who captured a similar serenity, sincerity and warmth across his work, turning towards the artist not only for chromatic inspiration but textural influence. “We created a suite of bespoke paint marks that represent the environments that Emerald Stay lives within,” Edwards explains, using oil paints and palette knives to craft representations of mountain and coastal views. Alongside providing an alluring tactility, the paint marks go hand-in-hand with the ‘The Eternity Loop,’ a striking monogram that both shapes a greater sense of ownership within the brand and helps further convey the mindfulness of Emerald Stay’s approach to hospitality. “It’s based on one of the eight auspicious symbols in Buddhism,” Edwards details, “symbolising the journey of life and the intertwining of wisdom and lived experience,” whilst also abstractly taking the form of an ‘ES’ in stamp form.