Porto Rocha's global refresh for W Hotels marks a 'new era of luxury hospitality'

If W Hotels has appealed to your creative heart over the last decade, it's because you're the target audience. Pitching itself as audacious, colourful and unabashedly fun, it was deemed a pioneer of luxury hospitality for the art and design set in the 2010s. But hey, things have changed. Competition is fierce, more than ever, and tastes have changed. Today, the very meaning of luxury has shifted away from that "in your face" opulence and leans more towards a subtle positioning, understanding people want less photo-op and more holistic experience.

But how can this new offering be brought to its branding? Enter Porto Rocha, who has helped refresh the hotel group around the idea of it being 'Luxury, Liberated'. What does that mean, exactly? "We pushed beyond the old signals of aspiration to create a vibrant yet sophisticated system designed to scale," the global studio explains. It achieved this by balancing "bold expression with intentional subtlety", crafting a new visual identity that translates across W Hotel's 65+ global locations and unique property types, including resorts, residences, and urban escapes.

The system Porto Rocha created meets two distinct yet equally important objectives: to attract new guests through attention-grabbing marketing and to enhance their stay once they are inside the hotel. As such, the studio introduced a vibrant colour palette, artful photography, large typography, and declarative messaging for promotional materials. However, once inside the property, the brand expression becomes more subtle, with a neutral palette and an emphasis on tactile materials and finishes. It's this approach that hopes to hit the right notes.

Preserving the iconic 'W' symbol seen at the top of buildings worldwide, Porto Rocha then simplified the logo lockups, information hierarchy, and brand architecture. It chose a single-sized wordmark integrated with the W symbol itself, transforming the previous vertical lockup with multiple fonts into 'W HOTELS' to create impact. Describing it as something akin to a fashion house logo, its approach seeks to inject the brand with greater confidence and flexibility.

Out of this exercise came a custom typeface developed in collaboration with Lineto that takes the geometric characteristics of the logo and extends them across each letterform. The result is W Supreme, a fully functional typeface packed with expressive qualities and elegant charm. To ensure consistency across languages, Porto Rocha introduced a custom W Supreme Arabic script and alternates in Mandarin and Japanese. The new typeface opens up a world of possibilities for the brand to communicate itself without relying too heavily on its logo.

As you'd expect, colour and imagery were big players in depicting this new vision of luxury. "We developed an extensive palette to replace the previous neons, maintaining their attitude while giving the brand a modern feel," it explains. Interestingly, colour combinations were defined for each location. Lifestyle imagery also holds some local specificity: "from white slopes for W Aspen to the famous boardwalk for W Barcelona". Porto Rocha worked with still-life photographer Sergiy Barchuk to create a suite of artful brand photography to be used across the entire system.

"Since the rebrand, W Hotels has continued to grow: opening locations in Budapest and Edinburgh, partnering with new creators, and publishing over a dozen new content series using the system. Free from the constraints of luxury's past, their refreshed identity now sets the tone for a liberated future," it concludes. And it's a future that builds on the best of W Hotels' bold heritage while embracing a more refined and meaningful interpretation of luxury.