Turning a hotel into an urban destination
When Sophia Fakhry, General Manager of Smallville Hotel, called us in, the brief was unusually specific — and unusually brave. Beirut already had design hotels, boutique hotels, and business hotels. What it didn’t have was a hotel that took itself seriously about play.
Sophia wanted Smallville to become a design destination with a superhero spine — urban, dynamic, and unafraid of being fun. Our job was to take that idea and make it feel like a place, not a costume.
What started as a brand identity refresh became a five-year collaboration across nearly every layer of the hotel — strategy, identity, signage, packaging, UX/UI, publication design, and the brand worlds of every restaurant, bar, spa, conference room, and event space inside the building. One client, one universe, dozens of touchpoints, built to feel like the same place.
A superpower for every space
Instead of treating “superhero” as decoration, we made it a system. Every venue inside Smallville got its own superpower — a single idea that decided how that space looked, sounded, and behaved. The rooftop was one kind of hero. The conference floor was another. Each got its own logo, its own voice, its own design vocabulary, all living inside the same Smallville universe. The most loved expression of the system is the smallest one: booking confirmation emails redesigned as Classified Superhero files — dossiers that brief guests on their mission and destination before they’ve even arrived. By the time they reach the front desk, they’re already in the story. The superhero idea stopped being a theme. It became the operating logic of the hotel.
One brand, many guests
Smallville hosts a corporate event on the third floor and a rooftop pool party on the eighth — sometimes on the same night. We mapped the user journeys of every guest type, from the executive arriving for a conference to the friends booking the bar, and tuned each venue’s identity to meet them where they are. The corporate floors stay refined. The social venues run loud. None of them feel like they’re pretending to be something else.
Distinct venues, one mosaic
The challenge wasn’t designing each venue. It was holding them together. Every restaurant, bar, and event space inside Smallville has its own visual character, its own typographic register, its own color logic — each one a story within the grand tale of the hotel. Up close, each venue is its own immersive experience: a rooftop poolhouse behaves nothing like the social bar two floors below, and neither feels anything like the spa. Step back and you see the collective narrative — one identity told through many voices.
Injecting Vibrancy, Color and Soul
Bold color and unconventional typography are easy to talk about and hard to commit to. We committed. The palette is loud where it needs to be loud and quiet where guests need rest. The type system is unapologetic in marketing material and disciplined in wayfinding. Visual energy isn’t applied to Smallville like a coat of paint — it’s how the place behaves.
Five years in, Smallville isn’t a hotel with a superhero theme. It’s a hotel where the superhero idea is the strategy, the operations logic, and the guest experience — all at once. Sophia’s bet was that Beirut would reward a hotel that took play seriously. It did.
