Saint Kate, the Arts Hotel

What exactly is an ‘arts hotel?’ How might the arts weave through the entire experience? Could a hotel function as an arts venue? How about a platform for the local creative community? A bridge between disparate communities in the same city?

One Design spent the better part of a year exploring these questions, in the run up to the unveiling of Saint Kate, Milwaukee’s Arts Hotel.

The project has been an ongoing collaboration between One Design, Stonehill Taylor architects, and Marcus Hotels & Resorts. Our team led brand research, concept development, naming, and identity and experience design. Twelve months in, we collectively laid the groundwork for a brand new boutique property that is redefining how people experience hotels; as well as how visitors from near and far approach, celebrate, and support the arts and the spirit of the creative process.

The hotel is all about a celebration of contrast. Ogg and GT America form the foundation of the brand’s typographic voice as a visual reflection of hotel’s conceptual duality: the high and the low, the polished and the in-progress, the elegant and the utilitarian, the classic and the progressive.

Saint Kate—a nod to Saint Catherine, the patron saint of artists—has been designed from the ground up to celebrate all modes of artistic expression, and to serve as a platform for the Milwaukee arts community, a hub for locals, and a portal to the scene for travelers from afar.