Union Station Hotel
a place-led hospitality brand
Nashville in the mid-2010s was filling up fast. New hotels were opening constantly, tourism was accelerating, and the city's hospitality market was getting crowded. Union Station had something none of the new builds had. A 125-year-old Gothic train station on Broadway, a soaring lobby atrium, a history that predated the city's modern identity. The question was how to make that clear, coherent, and competitive in a market that was suddenly paying attention.
The hotel had just completed a full interior renovation and wanted a brand to match. I was at ST8MNT and co-led the engagement as Creative Director and Brand Strategist, alongside a second creative director and a second strategist, with two art directors and a designer on the team.
The anchor
The strategic anchor we landed on after discovery was the monogram. A single USH mark designed to live everywhere. The logic was that a hotel with this much physical presence needed a brand that worked the same way. Not a logo applied to things. A mark woven into the place itself.
The system
Everything followed from that decision. The color system pulled from the building's own materials and history. Chambray Blue, Palliser Copper, the warmth of aged brass and dark wood.
The primary typeface, Fortescue, brought the historical weight the architecture deserved, with GT Pressura Mono as the secondary face.
The tile mosaic at the entrance was designed by our team and executed by the renovation contractor, so the brand was built into the building's floor before a guest ever checked in.
And out front, a custom typographic sculpture, over six feet tall and fabricated from our design, put the wordmark in the street, visible from Broadway, part of the hotel's physical presence in the city.
The result
A brand system deep enough to dress a hotel from the sidewalk to the staff uniform to the room service menu.
Years on, the mosaic is still in the floor and the sculpture is still on Broadway. Hospitality brands get refreshed every few years. The parts of this one that were built into the building are still doing their job.