Vikhem
Disciplines
Strategy, Branding, Website design
Industry
Architecture
Overview
Vikhem is a design-build architecture bureau in Bohuslän, working two ways: a range of pre-designed house models, or a fully custom design - always delivered by the same team from first sketch to handover. Blomdahl&Co developed the name, brand strategy, and visual identity, and designed a digital presence structured around both offerings.
Challenge
Companies that build homes tend to fall into two groups. Catalog house companies sell speed and price, with design as an afterthought. Architecture firms sell design, then hand the drawings to a separate contractor, where they are often simplified along the way.
Vikhem does both the drawing and the building. The brand needed to present a catalog offer and a custom offer as equals, without one looking like the budget option. It also needed to put Vikhem's real difference at the centre of the story: one team, accountable from design through construction.
Approach
We built the positioning on one idea: a design only survives if the people who drew it are the people who build it. That turns a detail of how Vikhem works into its main promise, summed up in the line "Built to belong." The name comes from vik (cove) and hem (home). It reads as a place, not a product, and works across the whole region.
The identity takes its palette from the materials Vikhem builds with: limewash, weathered timber and granite. A single oxide red, a nod to traditional Falu red, is the only accent. The lowercase wordmark is set in a restrained grotesk and paired with a serif for headlines. Photography uses bright, overcast coastal light and material close-ups instead of staged lifestyle scenes.
We applied the system to the pieces that carry the promise: a house model catalog designed to the same standard as the custom service, a five-step process piece that names the same team at every stage, site signage reused from project to project, and a website structured around the two ways to start.
Outcome
A brand system built around what makes Vikhem different: not the houses themselves, but the fact that one team answers for them from drawing to delivery. The catalog and the custom service sit side by side as two routes into the same promise, and every touchpoint repeats it, from the hoarding on site to the website.
As a concept project, Vikhem has no sales figures to report. What it shows is how we work: the strategy comes first, and the design follows from it.
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