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No. 9 Walton

High End Design for the Luxury Lifestyle

How do you say luxury without saying “luxury”?

That's the question the daydreamers and developers behind No. 9 Walton posed when they hired us to refine the building’s identity and marketing materials.

The stately high rise was designed to set a new standard for residential buildings in Chicago’s tony Gold Coast. Each unit presented an opportunity for bespoke living, inviting residents to customize every fixture and finish—even floorplans.

JDL, the company behind the building, came to us with their vision and a logo. What they needed next was a multi-sensory story, a way to sell prospects on a place that did not yet exist. And in a high-end market flooded with superlatives, they didn’t want to use the word luxury. They wanted to embody it.


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Marketing Collateral

We began by refining the logo and developing a sophisticated visual and material language. Silky purples, cool marbles and gold accents — enriched only further by prodigious white space — strike the right balance between dreamy and regal.

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Our first undertaking: a sumptuous suite of what can only be called brochures, though they are, in production and presentation, far from ordinary. The set includes five distinctive books, each stitch-bound in purple thread, with duplexed cover stock, gold foil stamping and metallic inks.

To house the collection, we commissioned custom mahogany boxes, lined in felt, with a satin pull tab for easy handling.

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Booke Design

The visual feast continues well past the set’s curb appeal. The books offer prospective buyers an exhaustive view of their many options — everything from modular floor plans to the finest finishes like polished nickel door handles and French oak flooring to premium amenities like private wine storage and a covered dog run. Every one of our design and production decisions was made to capture the breathless and tactile opulence of it all: tipped-in intro sheets, printed on slightly more delicate stock, gold foil building diagrams, and four-color printed architectural drawings rendered in watercolor.

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Promotional Strategy

With the marketing kit in order and designed to stir the imagination, all we needed was to drive interest and bodies into the sales center to experience the materials firsthand. We prepared a national run of print advertisements that appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Modern Luxury and Chicago Magazine, among others, as well as a dreadfully elegant invitation for the opening event.

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To help seal the deal, we threw in smooth-as-butter business cards. The system is, without a doubt, one of the most luxe we’ve created, and we did it sans luxury.”

Website Design & Development

The question of diction became more challenging when it came to the website, as we had a bit more copy to consider. But as always, it’s better to show than tell.

In addition to showcasing featured renderings and floorplans, the site takes a story-driven approach to illuminating the building’s commanding gestalt.

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Between the moody intro video, aspirational duotone imagery, visuals so textured you can almost touch them, and invitations to imagine yourself among the building’s abundant fineries, the site captures 9 Walton’s timeless elegance and modern take on high class living… without once saying the L‑word.