Stone Hollond

Caroline Paterson Interiors was founded in 1987, and has grown to become a renowned interior design studio. Known for its eclectic and sophisticated interiors and an emphasis on architectural detailing, the studio has mastered both traditional and modern interiors and regularly features in House and Garden’s Top 100.

The Challenge

In 2020, the helm of the company was taken over by Design Director Josh Stone and Interior Designer Phoebe Hollond (ex Beata Heuman). With over 35 years of experience behind them, Josh and Phoebe’s tastes are anchored in the narrative flair of Italian mid-century, sensually modernist with a twist of the glamorous art deco era.

Phoebe approached March to craft the brand identity and website for Stone Hollond. They needed to change the brand’s personality to reflect their values and speak to a new audience, without alienating their existing customers.

Discovery

As with all our projects, we began with a Discovery phase. The aim of Discovery is to understand the client’s goals and develop the strategy for the business. From this, the brand positioning and personality can be developed and latterly the website and supporting brand touchpoints.

Having commenced the project during the first Coronavirus lockdown, the value proposition workshop – where we uncover the values and positioning of the brand – was undertaken via Zoom with the support of Google Docs.

Once we had understood Stone Hollond’s values and position, we developed a brand statement that clearly and effectively expressed their design philosophy:

Solution

We produced two visual identity concepts to the client that supported their new value proposition. Following a collaborative review between March and Stone Hollond’s stakeholders, a final interior design branding concept was created, which included a logo, a logomark, colour palette, typography and example usage scenarios.

The next step of the project was to translate the brand effectively for online. We began with an Information Architecture (IA) diagram that showed the website’s content types and where they would sit in relation to one another. This was then taken one step further as a low fidelity wireframe (prototype), where we could show what type of content would sit on each page. The benefits of producing wires at an early stage are that our client could see what type of content they would need to collate and generate. They were then able to assemble this for us, while March worked on the User Interface designs.

Given the creative nature of the brand, we wanted a flexible system that wouldn’t restrict the client to fixed or templated layouts. With Elementor, we allowed Stone Hollond’s team to have near full control over the design of every single page and case study, without the need of any coding knowledge.

This also included the mobile (responsive) aspect of the website, which again could be fully controlled by their team within Elementor.

The final parts of the project were to set up a redirection on Caroline Paterson’s old website to inform visitors of the new brand and lead them to Stone Hollond. This would help to support the new brand and also meant that Stone Hollond would not lose any website traffic through the rebrand. 

We set up Google Analytics, Search Console and Yoast to lay the groundwork for best practice SEO, and cross-linked with Stone Hollond’s Instagram feed.

Lastly, we recorded a series of tutorial videos for Stone Hollond’s team, to provide a repository of supporting documentation which would make onboarding new staff members easier.

If you’d like to discuss how March can provide design and online solutions for you, please get in touch.