Identity & Web · 2023
Arcadia Living
A Lisbon interiors studio whose rooms are told as editorial stories — identity, art direction and a project archive.
- Client
- Arcadia Living
- Location
- Lisbon, Portugal
- Year
- 2023
- Services
- Visual identity, web design, art direction
Arcadia designs apartments and small hotels along the Portuguese coast. The rooms are quiet, material, a little stubborn about colour. The studio’s previous identity was a script logo that looked like a spa. Founder Inês Calder wanted the work to be read the way she reads a room: slowly, and in order.
The brief
A mark that could sit on a linen napkin and a planning application. A site that is an archive, not a feed. Photography direction for three houses already built and two still in drawing. No marble on the homepage.
The work
The identity is a stencilled grotesque and a set of paper rules. Colour is taken from the jobs: lime wash, Atlantic, a rust that appears in one hallway in Cascais. We wrote a photography brief that forbids wide-angle hero shots. Rooms are photographed at the height you stand in them.
The site is a long index of houses, each one a short essay with a plan you can pinch. Captions name the maker of the chair. It is not a lifestyle brand. It is a practice, documented.
People now write to us about a particular window. That is how I know the site is working. Inês Calder, Founder, Arcadia Living
What changed
Inbound shifted from “can you do our Airbnb” to private houses and a nine-room hotel in Comporta, currently on site. The identity has held through three years of jobs without a refresh. That was the brief.
