Saint-Urbain’s identities for The Henson hotel and its restaurant Matilda are the perfect double act

For Alex Ostroff, Founder & Creative Director of Saint-Urbain, the best part of crafting the identities for The Henson – a luxe hotel in Catskills, New York – and its fine-dining restaurant, Matilda, was working with the minds behind the project. His team essentially worked with two sets of clients – on the one hand, there were renovators Danielle and Ely Franko, who knew exactly what to do when a 19th-century former boarding house run as an Airbnb hit the market. The historic property was lovingly turned into The Henson by the pair and was also fitted with a fine-dining restaurant called Matilda, the brainchild of chefs Jeremiah Stone and Fabian von Hauske Valtierra of the Michelin-starred restaurants Contra (now Bar Contra) and Wildair – both NYC hotspots of resounding fame. Stone and von Hauske Valtierra were Saint-Urbain’s second pair of clients for the project, whom Ostroff had been a fan of “for roughly 10 years, Wildair and Contra being two of my favourite restaurants in New York City,” he says.

As the team started laying the foundations for the project, Ostroff had to reach back into his memories to understand what he knew of Catskills – the location being the driving force of the hotel’s identity – and what he had yet to learn. “Like many, my only reference for the Catskills was Dirty Dancing and 1950s Jewish standup comedy history (Borscht Belt), but after a few site visits, I got the picture. It’s a region with an extreme, quiet beauty, that we were tasked with harnessing,” he says. The opportunity that the project presented also inspired Ostroff to look back at the journey that Saint-Urbain has been on. “As an agency, beginning with small restaurant projects in cities like New York and Montreal, this moment really made us feel like we made it as far as hospitality projects go – being entrusted with such a special project in such a historic building and region. And amongst so much client talent.”

With all the right people in the right place at the right time, the stage was set for the project. From the very beginning, Ostroff noticed a few things – Stone and von Hauske Valtierra’s food is known for a certain sense of fun and playfulness that had to be mirrored in the identity, but history was equally important. The building that houses The Henson was opened in the 1800s as a boarding house and then became many hotels over the years. “Like the hotel itself, we wanted the brand to transform and unite old design into a new experience,” says Ostroff. “We wanted to pay our respects to the history of the building that has housed so many different people over a hundred years and have a logo that felt like it could have been there when it opened.”

The logo indeed feels historic, yet fresh. The team chose Fragment Glare from Pangram Pangram as the base font and tweaked the kerning and the details of counter shapes. “The typeface gave us the feeling of a 19th-century road sign and felt very outdoorsy at the same time,” Ostroff tells us. “To blend heritage with modernity, we adjusted the terminals of the letters and the counter space of the ‘O,’ adding sophistication and personality to the industrial feel the font has.”

For Matilda, Saint-Urbain chose Right Grotesk, also from Pangram Pangram, and simplified fine details like “ink traps, which made the letters more round and adjusted the boldness,” he adds. The team worked on the two identities, treating them as part of a family, each with its unique details. “Matilda is truly a little sister to The Henson. The connective tissue between the concepts is certainly the flora and fauna of the area,” says Ostroff. These plants, flowers and animals were incorporated into the hotel and restaurant’s story through a suite of illustrations, which were a bit more “rough and handmade” for Matilda, “to connect to how personal the dishes are and how local the ingredients are,” he adds. The restaurant was named after one of the clients’ grandmothers, whose memory was captured in the illustration of a character wearing a hat. “And of course, we have our mascot character, a self-assured rabbit, representing the playfulness of the chefs and the menu,” says Ostroff.

The illustrations show up quietly in many places; for example, the sprig of flowers that accompanies The Henson’s logo is seen in the room key chains and on the cuff of the crew’s sweatshirt. They tell visitors what they can expect from the landscape that surrounds the hotel; an illustration of a hiker with a map in hand hints at all the exploration Catskills promises.

However, they also fold in little moments of storytelling into the identity, making the people who’ve built The Henson a part of its brand. “We helped immortalise our client’s dog Bentley, who sadly passed away during the project,” says Ostroff. “We remembered him as one of those red-cross dogs from the movies, who bring stranded hikers a barrel of rum. Forever immortalised!”