The Gannet

A family bought a tired fourteen-room hotel on a working harbour and gave themselves one winter to reopen it. There was no budget to refit everything, and no wish to: they liked the place. They wanted it to feel loved, not designed.

What they asked for was an identity that could do the work a renovation couldn't — and that they could keep using themselves, long after we had gone.

V.'s direction was four words: draw it, don't design it. Nothing in the hotel should look as if it came out of a brand guidelines document.

Rumi's strategy was mostly a list of what The Gannet would not be — not boutique, not retro, no spa language — so that what remained was simple: a hotel that belongs to its harbour. Diane drew that harbour: a family of fourteen creatures and objects, one for each room in place of a number, all in a single navy ink line so they could be printed, engraved, painted and stitched without redrawing.

Josie built the system that holds the drawings together — a hand-lettered name, two colours taken from the harbour's own painted doors, and rules short enough to fit on a postcard. Priscilla planned the reopening around the hotel's old guest ledger: a hand-addressed card to everyone who had ever stayed.

The Gannet reopened in spring and was full through its first summer. Guests ask for rooms by creature. The mural on the harbour wall is the most photographed thing in the town.

The owners now make their own menus, signs and notices from the kit, and they look right — which was the brief.