idea house 3
communications, brand identity, copywriting, content strategy
The original Idea Houses were a Walker Art Center programme from the 1940s — full-scale modernist homes built for public exhibition, grounded in the belief that good design belonged in everyday life, not just museums. Idea House 3 was the Walker's return to that legacy: a contemporary retail destination, both online and in-person, for collectible design objects, furniture, and home accessories by contemporary makers and artists. The challenge wasn't just launching a store; it was carrying eighty years of institutional design philosophy into a living commercial context without letting it become either a heritage exercise or a generic luxury retail experience.
I was commissioned to build the brand strategy and verbal identity from the inside out, working closely with the Walker's team to understand what the Idea House lineage actually meant and where Idea House 3 sat within it. The red thread was the institution's long role at the intersection of design, architecture, and public life — its conviction that designed objects are cultural objects, and that the home is a site of aesthetic and intellectual meaning. That conviction became the editorial spine: from the content architecture of the e-commerce experience (how products were framed, contextualised, and sequenced) to the press positioning (how the launch story was told to design and cultural press), to the in-store materials and marketing copy. The UX writing decisions — how a product page sounds, what an email subject line does, how editorial context sits alongside commercial content — were all built to serve the same thesis: that buying something from Idea House 3 is an act of considered taste.
