Work Petra Architects
Petra Architects, 2023
Showing buildings, not renderings
- Sector
- Architecture
- What we did
- Identity, website, publication
- Where
- Syros, with work across the Cyclades
- How long
- 14 weeks
A quiet identity for a practice that restores stone buildings and does not want to look like it sells glass towers.
1 in 3fewer enquiries, and the right ones
The brief
Petra's work is restoration: cisterns, mansions, a monastery kitchen. Their old site looked like every architecture site, all glossy renderings, and attracted exactly the clients they did not want.
The real problem
Glossy renderings brought in clients who wanted glass towers. Petra restores stone.
What we did
The system is cut from rectangles in the proportions of their own drawings, in the colours of the stones they work with. The website shows photographs of finished, lived-in buildings, with the plans beside them. A printed monograph uses the same grid.
What we made
On the wall
Direction C, the serif, came closest to the lettering on the old stone lintels.
Every Friday at four, each project in progress is pinned up at real size. Why we print it
What changed
Enquiries dropped by a third and the ones that remained were the right ones. Petra now turns work down, which they had never done before.
We get fewer calls, and all of them are about the kind of building we want to work on.