Sand & Sea

Sand & Sea is a nine-room boutique hotel inside a restored pearl-merchant house in old Muharraq. The owners had the building, the story and the taste. What they did not have was a brand, a way to take bookings, or a story that would make people want to come.

The brief

One studio, all three lanes, one launch. Build the identity, the website and the launch campaign together so a guest meets the same hotel on Instagram, on the booking page and at the door.

• Naming, identity system and a full print suite
• A booking website that works on a phone, in Arabic and English
• A launch campaign — photography, social content and print — for opening week
• Signage, amenities and campaign posters for the neighbourhood

The identity

The house sits between the palm groves and the pearl-diving jetties, so the mark is a single frond drawn like a diver’s rope knot. Sea blue for the water, terracotta for the coral stone the house is built from, and a cream that matches the plaster inside. One serif, set tight, and a lot of restraint.

The website

Most hotel sites are a maze of widgets. Ours is a single, calm page per room and a booking flow that takes three taps. It is bilingual, loads in under a second on a phone, and the owners update rates and availability themselves.

For the first time, the hotel online feels like the hotel in real life.

Layla Al Mannai — Owner, Sand & Sea

The launch campaign

We shot for two evenings at blue hour: the courtyard fountain, the lanterns coming on, a guest crossing to dinner. The photographs became the opening-week posters in the neighbourhood, a twelve-page brochure and a month of social content that needed no captions.

The result

The hotel opened fully booked for its first six weekends, the launch campaign reached 210k people organically, and the identity has since been extended to a second property on the island.