La Casa del Habano is a Havana cigar house, and this is a self directed rebrand rather than a commissioned one.
The category sits on a narrow ledge. Push the heritage too hard and it becomes a pastiche of an old Cuban label. Modernise too hard and it stops being credible for a product whose entire value is that nothing about it has changed in a century.
So the identity borrows its structure from the one piece of graphic design every cigar already carries. The band. The logotype is set in engraved serif capitals between two fluted rules that taper at the ends, which is a band unrolled and flattened. It reads as authentic without dressing up, and it wraps naturally around anything cylindrical.
The pattern does the other half of the work. Cuban floor tiles, the geometric cement tiles found in Havana houses, redrawn in claret, black and gold. It carries the place without printing a flag or a map on anything.
Claret and gold throughout, with the claret dark enough to hold under low light, which is the condition the shop is actually lit in. Applications cover packaging and boxes, window vinyl and opening hours, interior and collateral.
