European hotels have UK groups at their service

Hotel design hotted up this week with two London consultancies set to roll out design work for Madrid’s Hotel Ritz, and Prague’s iconic Hotel Jalta respectively.

Social UK is designing visual identities for the Hotel Ritz Madrid’s four dining areas, due to relaunch from May. The London group will create seven menus for the hotel’s prestigious Goya and Terrace restaurants and more casual Garden and Hall and Bar areas, with a brief to review banqueting and room-service menus.

Hotel Ritz Madrid executive assistant manager Marc Rodriguez says the identity work, which coincides with an interior refurbishment by French architect Patrick Jouannet, follows the hotel’s acquisition last April by the Orient- Express Hotels group.

‘We wanted to give the Ritz a fresh new look and ensure that our guests can identify which venue they’re dining in,’ he explains.

Social UK creative director Paul Driver says the challenge has been to update identities for ‘traditional’ spaces that are immersed in ‘regal, iconic’ themes.

Meanwhile, London group Kugel has designed the brand identity for Prague’s Hotel Jalta, which is due to relaunch next month following an extensive refurbishment. The work encompassed the creation of a marque that will be applied across a range of items including signage, stationery, livery, menus and a website, www. jalta.cz, which the group also designed and built.

Consultancy joint managing director Nick Hughes says the challenge was to ‘freshen up’ the identity of a site still remembered as the favoured venue of the Soviet Communist party.

The typographical marque, rendered in blue and grey, ‘gets the heritage of the site, but is cooler, fresher and more inviting’, he says.