Strange Family designs its Brooklyn live-work studio as a hotel brand

The Brand Identity: Behind a set of carved wooden double doors at number 348, in a Park Slope brownstone built in 1920, two floors of intricate millwork, paned glass, clawfoot bathtubs and creaky wood floors make up Strange House. The live-work studio belongs to Strange Family, the international creative and technology company with bases in New York, San Francisco and Guadalajara, and it serves as the agency’s Brooklyn home – a place where its distributed teams and visiting collaborators can meet, work and stay. “What if we designed an office like a boutique hotel?” recalls Ben McNutt, Founder & Executive Creative Director.

“That was the inspiration for Strange House.” The thinking didn’t start there, though. Strange Family had let go of its traditional San Francisco office during the pandemic and successfully transitioned to a hybrid model, but McNutt found himself thinking following a 2023 lunch with David Galullo, CEO & CCO of interior architecture firm Rapt Studio. Galullo had made the case that companies should also be reimagining apartments – treating them as the workspace, living space and social space they had effectively become. “That stuck with me,” McNutt admits.

The question turned from what kind of office Strange Family needed to what kind of space it actually wanted. From there, the Chelsea Hotel emerged as a point of inspiration. The bygone-era residential hotel housed artists and the avant-garde in messy proximity – the kind of irreverent retreat that McNutt describes as “a perfect fusion of heritage and mischief.” The identity needed to reflect the brownstone as well. A building with its own grammar, which Strange Family wanted to honour. The Creative Team, led by Creative Director Caroline Jones designed the wordmark with a custom evolution of Lettra Mono, from Pangram Pangram.

“We chose it because we wanted it to feel just a little bit ‘off,’ a little bit curious,” she explains. “It has a very angular quality; it’s faceted where it could or should be curved.” Bradford Mono by Lineto handles the supporting copy, set in all-caps for display lines and lowercase for body, lending the system the cadence of typewritten correspondence: a welcome card, a party invitation, a note left on a kitchen counter. At the centre of the identity is a bird. A dove – or rather a pigeon, since the pigeon is the more honest New York symbol – holds a lit cigarette in its beak, contained within an oval seal.

Jones developed the illustration with Jordan Rosenberg, and her metaphor for the brand’s character is exact. “This brand is like your punk ass cousin who’s in and out of prep schools on the East Coast, a Holden Caulfield type,” she says. “We wanted all illustrations to have that wink: a classic at first glance, but there’s something unusual if you look closer.” The oval seal carries institutional and collegiate cues, suggesting a private members’ club or a hotel crest, while the pigeon inside delivers the joke. Both elements are deliberately flexible.

Sometimes the bird sits in the seal; sometimes it doesn’t; sometimes the seal takes a different shape entirely. McNutt frames the contrast as one belonging to New York itself. “It’s another way we manifest the tension in the brand between heritage and defiance,” he says, “which to us captures a tension at the heart of New York itself.” Across the system, those heritage cues are softened by what Jones calls “a hit of wabi sabi.” The type is never quite the same from one application to the next. The green – a mossy shade lifted from East Coast academia and old hotel signage – is never one precise value.

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The article discusses a unique approach to multifunctional spaces that could influence broader brand strategies, making it significant and relevant for industry professionals, though the concept of blending work and leisure is becoming more common.