The Challenge
The Other House was launching an entirely new hospitality category in South Kensington: a high-end, members’-club-style long-stay concept blending boutique hotel, serviced apartment, and private members’ club, targeting both long-stay guests (wealthy students, business travellers not wanting to feel hotel-bound) and a local, well-heeled resident membership audience. As a genuinely novel concept with no established category conventions to test messaging against, the brand had already invested heavily in a polished visual identity, including a bespoke all-caps custom display typeface and a deliberate refusal to use standard hospitality terminology like ‘Rooms’, before any user research had been conducted to validate whether that identity actually communicated clearly.
The Outcome
The client’s own public reflection describes this as a truly novel concept with no blueprints to follow, corroborating the genuine difficulty of the messaging problem being solved. Independently, the property went on to become a well-reviewed, successful business, with over 4,000 guest reviews and a ‘Fabulous’ rating, and a planned second-property expansion did proceed. The South Kensington property is currently closed for a confirmed, planned refurbishment rather than as a result of business failure.
The Approach
Conducted user research to test comprehension of the brand’s core proposition. Findings surfaced genuine confusion: users didn’t reliably understand the brand-specific terminology used in place of standard hospitality language, and the custom all-caps display typeface reduced legibility in key heading contexts. Also identified a structural problem recurring across other hospitality clients, the choice between one unified group site, which dilutes each property’s local SEO potential, or property-specific local sites linked from a group hub, which risks users losing track of which site they were on. Findings and recommendations were presented to the client; some were actioned, but the terminology and typeface issues were largely not addressed.
