A seaside guest house where calm, nature and the Mediterranean set the tone. Five suites, each with its own identity. A lush garden, a pool hidden from the world, and a level of care that turns first-time visitors into regulars. We've been working alongside Le Courti since the very beginning of the project.
The place had soul but no visual voice. Le Courti needed a brand that communicates calm, luxury and distinction at first glance. A positioning that stands apart in a crowded market, between Perpignan and the Languedoc-Roussillon coastline. A modern digital presence. And an art direction strong enough to carry both a local identity and a universal sense of welcome — one that transmits the sensitivity of the place and its hosts before a guest even arrives.
Brand strategy, logo and crest design, visual identity system, entrance signage, in-room menus and welcome booklets, white papers, social media art direction, marketing campaigns, advertising displays, flyers, print collateral, website on Framer and ongoing creative direction.
We started with the people, not the property. The hosts' passion, their desire to share, the way they welcome guests — that became the foundation. The beauty of the estate, the light, the garden, the proximity to the sea — all of that was already there. Our job was to let the luxury emerge naturally from the identity, through the human warmth behind it, not on top of it.
Some places don't need to be invented. They need to be revealed.
The first time I visited Le Courti, the branding project wasn't even discussed yet. I just walked through the garden, sat by the pool, and understood. The light, the silence, the smell of fig trees and salt air. Laurent had spent years shaping this place with his hands — choosing every tile, every plant, every fabric. Guests already loved it. The reviews were exceptional. But visually, none of that existed. No logo, no colour system, no coherent presence. The estate had a soul but no face. Halfway between Perpignan and the Mediterranean, in the heart of Occitanie, everything was there except the identity.
The challenge wasn't to create a guest house brand from nothing. It was to listen carefully enough that the identity would feel like it had always been there.
A hotel logo needs to work everywhere — embroidered on a towel, debossed on a menu, shrunk to 16 pixels as a favicon. But before any of that, it needs to mean something. The Le Courti crest was built around three ideas that define the place.
1. The shield evokes the estate itself: a sense of home, heritage and protection, rooted in place.
2. The floral elements mirror the lush tranquility of the garden, expressing softness, calm and natural elegance.
3. The calligraphic "C" acts as a refined signature, reinforcing the premium positioning while subtly anchoring the identity in the name Le Courti.
The crest works as a standalone symbol, independent from the logotype. That modularity was deliberate — a hotel brand lives on signage, on a website favicon, on a stamp, on a wine label. It has to hold at every scale.
Quiet luxury.
Rooted in place.
Most hospitality branding is designed in a studio, then applied to a space. Here, it was the opposite. I spent time in every room, touched the materials, looked at how light moved through the shutters at different hours. The art direction grew directly from the interior design — not as a layer on top of it, but as its extension.
Each of the five suites has its own character. A different palette, a different mood, a different story on the walls. The brand system had to embrace those differences without losing coherence. Coastal textures became the common thread: the warmth of raw linen, the grey of local stone, the green of Mediterranean foliage. The visual identity flows across all five suites without forcing them into uniformity.
The brand should live in the guest's hands.
A guest picks up the breakfast menu. They open the welcome booklet in their suite. They notice the label on the artisanal beer from the local brewery. Each of these moments is a brand touchpoint — and each one was designed with the same care as the logo itself. The paper weight, the typography, the way the crest sits in the corner of a card. Nothing generic, nothing that could belong to any other guest house.
That's what separates hotel branding that works from hotel branding that decorates. When a guest takes a welcome card home as a souvenir, the brand has done its job. It lives beyond the stay.
The collaboration with a local brewery was an exercise in balance, where the constraint of scale became a genuine creative opportunity. The identity had to exist fully on a bottle label while carrying the estate's narrative. We designed a composition built around a watercolour of the garden by a local artist, combined with the crest logo and the estate's coordinates.
This work of synthesis produced an object that is both functional and sensitive: the label becomes a meeting point between craftsmanship and storytelling, extending the experience of the place beyond the estate and embedding its world into an everyday product.
Le Courti® started as an estate that guests already loved but couldn't quite describe to their friends. Today, there's a crest on the gate, a visual language on every surface, and a website that converts curiosity into bookings. The 9.6 rating on Booking.com didn't come from the branding alone — it came from Laurent's obsession with hospitality. But the branding gave that obsession a face, a voice, and a consistency that guests recognise before they arrive and remember long after they leave. That's what building a brand from day one looks like — whether it's a sports nutrition brand born in the Pyrenees or a guest house 500 metres from the sea.
Laurent B.
Owner - Domaine Le Courti
"Richard immediately grasped the essence of the project. From the entrance of the estate to the finest details within the suites, the creative direction perfectly captures what I wanted to offer my guests: a true sense of serenity, immersed in nature."
Le Courti®
Guest house by the sea.
Pyrene®
French nutrition for ultra-endurance.
Forvis Mazars®
International audit, tax and advisory network.
Menao®
B2B app for artisans and craftsmen.
Ultra Bike France®
French ultra-cycling event series.
Pace®
Triathlon and individual sports coaching.
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