Signs 90210

Beverly Hills’ personification of luxury and elegance penetrates all senses. Its residents and visitors possess an intangible, but palpable, sense of satisfaction, and even the scent in the air exudes success. High-end brands Hermes, Armani and Tiffany, among others, have owned their patrician caché for decades, and have been joined by such über-opulent boutiques as Bijan’s, where patrons expect to spend five, if not six, figures.

In an environment where ostentatious becomes blasé, creating an environment that’s truly distinctive poses a significant challenge. When the Montage, a five-star hotelier, and The Athens Group, a luxury-resort developer, joined forces to open the 201-room Montage Beverly Hills — the first new Beverly Hills hotel in nearly two decades — they knew the importance of creating a property suitable for such a lavish locale. The Athens Group contracted Santa Ana, CA-based Sign Source to develop a regal sign program befitting a resort that caters to demanding clientele.

The Athens Group first hired Sign Source to fabricate and install an environmental-graphic program for Hawaii’s The Four Seasons Hualalai resort in 1996, and they’ve worked together for several projects thereafter.

The Montage Beverly Hills’ architect, Hill Glazer Studio’s Palo Alto office, created the property in a Spanish Revival style, which Athens Group project manager Dustin Peterson said is a prevalent Beverly Hills architectural style.

“With hotels, it’s become a trend to make the property look like it’s been a permanent fixture in the fabric of its environment,” he said. “We wanted to create a hotels that embodied the luxury of Hollywood in the 1920s and ’30s. Luxury hotels and resorts are designed as self-contained entities, and creating such an environment within a single city block does pose a challenge.”

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John Mearns, Sign Source’s president, said his longstanding relationship with the Athens Group helped him gibe his sign program the Montage’s architectural and interior-design footprint and bring him into the design process early. He said, “An effective design-build collaboration begins with meshing material ideas with the architectural vision from the ground up.”

Because of what Mearns termed “the richness of the architectural materials,” he and Gerry Stamm, Sign Source’s lead graphic designer, selected antique-finished bronze for most of the approximately 1,000-sign program. Sign Source waterjet-cut the ¼-in.-thick, bronze backer panels and applied photo-etched, zinc signfaces that comprise the sign’s Grade II Braille, ADA-compliant face. For back-of-house signage, the shop fashioned etched-photopolymer placards.

Stamm designed the program using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator and Mike Nguyen, the shop’s lead draftsman, developed shop pre-fabrication drawings with CorelDRAW. For ADA-compliant signs, Mearns and his team selected the Stone Sans letterstyle; for other elements, they chose Goudy Regular Italic and Bold Italic.

The Montage bears relatively few exterior signs – there’s a monument sign at the property’s entrance, a sign for the city-owned parking garage beneath the hotel, a few sign for the property’s public-accessible garden, and a smattering of building-code signage. Because Montage and The Athens Group cultivated positive relationships with the city and obtained permits in a cooperative and timely manner, these progressed relatively seamlessly through the approval process.

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Mearns noted the level of teamwork and attention to detail required from all parties to execute such a voluminous, complex project, and Peterson emphasized the importance signage plays for Athens developments: “Signs are among the last components to be installed on a property, but they’re among the most important in creating an onsite identity and sense of place.”