Studio Bland gives every experience at The Calile its own sub-identity

Opened in 2018, The Calile is an urban resort in Brisbane, Australia, and by 2023 its brand was firmly established, launched and protected across the hotel’s first five years by Australian design studio Studio Bland. The identity was working, so this time the brief looked inward. “We did not feel the brand needed to be renewed; rather, we wanted to deepen what it stood for and how people could experience it,” explains Catherine Malouf, Director at Calile Malouf Investments. “We saw the hotel not simply as a place to stay, but as a platform through which we could meaningfully contribute to Brisbane’s cultural life.” Richards & Spence’s architecture had given the hotel a library, a pool at its centre, a garden on the roof, and an amphitheatre and event spaces made for gathering. Studio Bland in collaboration with communications agency New Initiative shaped a cultural programme of four recurring strands from what was already there at the hotel: Book Club, Swim Sets, Rooftop Harvest and Calile Culture. To give the programme a face, the studio designed a visual language system of sub-identities that could sit under the parent Calile brand they’d already established. “Each needed enough independence to develop its own character, audience and appeal while remaining unmistakably part of The Calile,” Malouf notes. “We saw the brand as the sum of many parts, which meant we could move away from its most obvious DNA while still keeping the cultural programme aligned,” explains Creative Director Lucy Bland. The strands are held together by a shared sensibility, with the same finesse, quality and restraint. “There are so many levers within a brand that can be played with – photography, composition, typography, tone of voice, subject matter, audio and animation,” Bland continues. “The discipline was in choosing a few, rather than changing all of them at once, so there was always a connection back to the primary brand.” They moved away from the reflexes of hotel marketing, for example, steering clear of the heterosexual couple narrative the category leans on. “If a concept started to sound like a typical hotel, we’d stop and work out how to say the same thing through a more contemporary lens suited to an urban resort,” Bland adds.