Kent Hollow
Visual Identity
Kent Hollow
Kent Hollow is a valley in Litchfield County, Connecticut, home to five colonial farms that have survived since the 1700s. The Grounds at Kent Hollow is the oldest of them, built in 1799, and the brief was to position it as an educational and cultural destination without letting it read as a static exhibit. A 227-year-old house does not need convincing as historic. It needs a reason someone plans a Saturday around it.
Most heritage brands solve this on a screen: a website, a logo that lives in a header. Kent Hollow does not live on a screen. It lives on a flag over the lawn, a tin of candles in the shop, a coaster under a glass, a postcard mailed home from a visit. That constraint set the whole system. The mark is an oval badge built around an architectural illustration of the house, drawn to hold its detail at the scale of a lapel pin and read clean at the scale of a barn flag, because the same mark had to do both jobs without being redrawn.
The palette was pulled from the building rather than a mood board: cedar, bone, an Americana teal, extended into softer tints for print and signage. The typography sets an old-style American display face against two contemporary workhorses, so the material reads as period-appropriate without slipping into costume. Preservation was the subject the client came in with. The system was built so the venue itself could speak in the present tense.
