From Courtside Afternoons to a Brand World Without Green

The Idea That Started On A Padel Court

This year, padel found its way into our weekends in a way we did not expect. What began as a casual game turned into something closer to a ritual: the slow unwinding of a Saturday afternoon, the way a sport built for competition somehow became a setting for connection. Somewhere between those matches and the drinks that followed, an idea started to take shape.

Padel is having a moment, and it's not happening in isolation. Wellness-led social clubs are reshaping what a "third space" looks like, pulling people away from screens and back into rooms and courts where connection happens face to face. As that shift gathers pace, it felt like the right moment to look again at how racquet sports have traditionally presented themselves, and to ask whether that visual language still fits the mood of the spaces being built today. Padel, in particular, is inheriting a lot of tennis's old branding instincts without necessarily needing them. That gap felt worth exploring, and The Hollis Racquet Club became the vehicle.

Starting From No Green

Every project needs a constraint to push against, and this one had an obvious candidate sitting right in front of it. Tennis and country club branding has leaned on the same visual shorthand for decades: greens borrowed from the court, blues borrowed from clear skies. It's a palette so familiar it barely registers as a choice anymore. So the brief for The Hollis began with a rule: no green, anywhere, at any stage.

What filled that gap was a palette built on three unexpected combinations, something KOVA is also becoming rather synonymous with. Purple became the anchor, chosen for its associations with royalty and exclusivity, a colour that has always carried a sense of quiet luxury. Orange sits opposite it, injecting energy and vitality into a palette that could otherwise have tipped into something too austere. Magenta rounds out the trio, giving the whole system warmth and a bit of edge, a bit of feminine intuition you could say.

The photography direction follows the same instinct. Courts photographed in lavender and dusty rose. Tennis balls rendered in a soft periwinkle rather than the expected fluorescent yellow. Even the net, usually the most utilitarian element in any racquet sport image, gets cast in warm orange light against a violet cord. None of it reads as artificial or forced. It reads like a version of the country club aesthetic that had always been possible but never attempted.

The Logo, the Script, and the Crest

Every heritage brand needs a typographic backbone, and this is where the identity leans hardest into nostalgia while still keeping one foot in the present. The logotype pairs a looping, hand-drawn script for "The" with Bona Nova, a serif with real British heritage lineage, set in confident uppercase for "HOLLIS." The combination is deliberate. The script carries warmth and flourish, the kind you'd expect on a wedding invitation or a hand-lettered welcome sign. The serif carries permanence and authority, a typeface you would expect engraved on a founding plaque. Together, they suggest a place that is high-end with hospitality at its finest.

Above the wordmark sits the crest, a monogram built from the interlocking initials T and H, held inside a rounded rectangle with softly scalloped edges. That shape is a deliberate nod to the vintage luggage tags and embossed stationery that have always signalled inherited elegance. Encasing the monogram this way gives it the weight of a family seal, something that belongs stitched onto a blazer pocket or pressed into a signet ring that stands the test of time.

One Shape, Four Lives

Perhaps the proudest moment of this identity is the journey that rounded rectangle takes across the brand system. It doesn't stay put as a static logo container. It moves.

It begins its life as a frame around the monogram, holding the interlocking T and H. From there, it expands outward, becoming its own shape, to be taken in a solid fill or to deliberately frame a brand image. Carry it further into the digital world and the same silhouette reappears as the outline of a menu button on the website concept, a small but conscious echo that ties the online experience back to the physical mark. And in its final form, that same rounded rectangle becomes the die-cut edge of an "Admit One" tournament ticket stub; an actual physical collateral a member can feel in their hand on the way to a Saturday invitational.

Icon frame, brand shape, menu button, ticket stub. Four different applications, one continuous shape, carried through in all its subtlety. That's the kind of detail that rarely gets noticed consciously, but it's exactly what gives a brand its sense of cohesion. It gives the eye something familiar to hold onto no matter where it encounters the mark, whether that's on a hat, a laptop screen, or an envelope sealed with wax.

The World Being Built

Pull all of these decisions back and a fuller picture starts to emerge. The Hollis Racquet Club is an attempt to build a world around sun-drenched, unstructured hours: matches that run long because nobody's watching the clock, deals quietly closing over post-match drinks, a wardrobe built for both the court and the lawn afterward. Access itself becomes part of the appeal, with the club feeling members-only in spirit long before it becomes members-only in policy.

That's ultimately what this project set out to test: whether a category as visually settled as racquet sports still has room for a genuinely different point of view, and whether heritage cues and an unexpected palette could sit comfortably together in one system. The Hollis Racquet Club is one answer to that question, and I'll happily leave the verdict on whether it's the right one to whoever sees it next.