Responses by Fritz Klaetke, principal and design director, Visual Dialogue.
Background: The residential housing market in the Boston area is very competitive, with new properties popping up virtually every week. Bruce Percelay, chairman of development firm Mount Vernon Company, understood the power of design as a differentiator in this crowded market, a means to stand out from the often cookie-cutter approaches seen in other residential buildings. For Arthaus, Percelay asked us to express the youthful, creative vibe of Boston’s Allston neighborhood throughout the building inside and out. This meant extending the branding we developed to interiors and large-scale art installations, giving prospective residents a feeling of living in a “refined artist’s loft”—whether they were artists (several spaces were set aside as affordable units for working artists) or not.
Design thinking: For the “haus” side of Arthaus, we developed a logo based on designer Herbert Bayer’s “universal” typeface created for the Bauhaus in 1925. The key brand color is yellow—one of the three primary colors identified with the Bauhaus—expressed in 45-degree angle stripes that reference the pattern on the exterior facade of the building, which was designed by Cambridge, Massachusetts–based architecture firm PCA. The “art” theme is infused into all the common spaces, from the four-story mural of a painter (painting a mural) to the self-portrait of neighborhood namesake Washington Allston to multicolored paint cans in the kitchen to pop-art brushstrokes in the hallways to an anamorphic message painted on the top-floor stairwell.
Favorite details: In our research phase, we stumbled upon the fact that the Allston neighborhood was named for Washington Allston, a 19th-century Harvard grad, poet and painter—and possessor of a great head of hair. When you first enter Arthaus, you encounter a large-scale self-portrait of Allston in the lobby with the signature yellow stripes running over the image and onto the wall. This connection to the neighborhood makes the artwork relevant and provides an interesting backstory for both the brokers and residents to spread.
Challenges: Carrying the overall brand concept and creative vision into a cohesive, experiential space on a large scale—with the usual construction curveballs. Luckily, we had great collaborators in our interior design partners, Sonja Haviland and Haley Mistler from Superette and Andrew Bablo of Steez Design, the artist, craftsman and all-around problem solver who executed all of our crazy art installation ideas.
New lessons: Although we’ve created interior spaces and artwork for single-family residential and commercial spaces, this was our first opportunity to extend a brand’s overall creative direction throughout a multiunit residential property. It makes sense that all the elements of an overall creative vision work together—visual identity, signage and wayfinding, website, print, artwork, and interiors—but it’s very rare for this vision to be realized.
Visual influences: Arthaus’s installations reference the work of a range of artists: Banksy and Chuck Close on the exterior mural, Damien Hirst and Mr. Brainwash in the grid of multicolored paint cans, Roy Lichtenstein in the pop-art brushstrokes, Ed Ruscha in the anamorphic type, and of course, Washington Allston in the lobby’s self-portrait.
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