Turning Saudi's first homegrown luxury hotel chain into an icon
What is luxury in a market where luxury is everywhere? How to shift perspectives in a country where everything coming from abroad is perceived as better?
When the founder of Vivienda Hotels approached us in 2015, he had four villas in Riyadh and a clear-eyed ambition: to build the first local luxury hotel chain Saudi Arabia could call its own — and have it stand alongside the international names, not beneath them. Our brief was to give that ambition a brand that could carry it.
What started in 2015 with one founder and four villas has become an eleven-year partnership. Vivienda today operates seven destinations — six in Riyadh and Vivienda Jeddah — and joined Preferred Hotels & Resorts’ LVX Legend Collection, the network’s top tier of independent luxury hotels, during our work together. The collaboration hasn’t paused. We’re still in the room as the brand grows.
The brand audit
Before we touched anything, we ran a full audit. Materials, in-room collateral, communications, every guest touchpoint we could observe. We sat with the founder, the management, the front-of-house staff. We stayed in the villas. The pattern that emerged was a brand fighting itself: some moments were already five-star — quality, warmth, attention — while others still read as the work of a real-estate developer building hotels. Our job was to close that gap inside the brand before it could be closed in operations.
Elevating where it was already strong
Vivienda had to feel iconic before a guest arrived, and continue feeling iconic after they left. We mapped the emotional journey from the first time someone hears the name to the goodbye message after checkout — every encounter, digital and physical, treated as a chance to surprise or to comfort. The map became the brief. Everything we built afterward — identity, tone, communications, social — was checked against it.
Turning the mundane into the extraordinary
One of Vivienda’s five core values, written into the brand foundations, is “The Extraordinary” — defined as the search for something memorable in the smallest interaction. We took that literally. Where guests expected ordinary — a confirmation, a check-in, a turndown — we worked with the team to design a moment of unexpected care. The brand stopped being something the marketing team owned. It became the operating logic of the front desk, the kitchen, the housekeeping floor.
A logo that holds two ideas: a feather and a palm
The logo is built on two ideas held at once: a feather and a palm. The feather carries lightness, hospitality, the gesture of welcome — the feeling of being received rather than merely checked in. The palm grounds the mark in place: Saudi Arabia, the desert, the long horizon, a hospitality tradition that predates the hospitality industry. The two forms had to share one silhouette — soft enough to read as a feather, structured enough to read as a palm, irregular enough not to look like a standard hotel mark. We drew it line by line until the shape did both jobs without compromising either. The supporting triad reads it back in three words: authentic, universal, irregular.
Building the Vivienda community
How to remain discreet yet engage in a conversation? How to create bonds without invading privacy? Becoming an icon required real relationships, not louder marketing. We built communications — emails, social, the front-of-house tone — that carried Vivienda’s quiet attentiveness. Small, repeated, recognisable. Over time those interactions added up to something bigger than a guest list. They became a Vivienda community.
A cocoon called home — and the words for it
From the first audit, one feeling kept surfacing in guest interviews: people described Vivienda as a place that felt like coming home. Not an escape, not a fantasy — home. We built around it. Inside the villas, natural materials, flowers, generous privacy thresholds. Outside, communications that whispered rather than shouted. And the brand needed a phrase to hold all of it. We wrote one: Where Home is. It now leads every channel — site, signage, social — and quietly does what a tagline is supposed to do: tell guests, before they’ve even arrived, what kind of stay this is.
The proof that the words land isn’t in marketing decks; it’s in the guest book. Vivienda has families who’ve stayed in the same villa for more than six years — guests who arrived to spend a few weeks and made it home. We’ve had the personal coach of one of the world’s most-watched athletes arrive in Riyadh to scout a hotel, stay at Vivienda, and stop scouting. He still lives there.
What changed in eleven years
In 2015, Vivienda had four villas in Riyadh and a hard time making the case for Saudi luxury. Today, it has seven destinations across Riyadh and Jeddah. It has earned three World Travel Awards. The brand joined Preferred Hotels & Resorts’ LVX Legend Collection — the network’s top tier of independent luxury hotels — during our partnership. And in Jeddah, Vivienda is regularly chosen to host the international talent who travel in for the Red Sea Film Festival, Saudi Arabia’s premier cultural moment. We can’t take credit for those wins alone — the team on the floor earned every one of them. But the positioning, the identity standards, the brand discipline we built helped make the case for them. Above all, Vivienda now has something that didn’t exist eleven years ago: real brand equity. A name that travels, a promise that holds, a community that returns. The partnership is still active — we’re currently working with the team on the next phase of Vivienda’s social and digital presence — because a brand this carefully built is worth keeping in motion.