Illustration • Luxury Hospitality
A children’s book that belongs in a Four Seasons room
Four Seasons Hotel Seattle commissioned an original children’s activity book to improve the experience for traveling families. It had to be engaging enough that children want to use it, sophisticated enough to belong in a Four Seasons room, and useful enough to reduce friction for parents during a stay. The hard part wasn’t any one of those — it was solving all three at once without any of them compromising the others.
One book, a whole family of ages
Before any illustration, I looked into how children of different ages actually use activity books — which formats land for which age ranges (coloring pages, word searches, crosswords, tic-tac-toe, mazes), and how to sequence them so one book holds attention across a range of ages in the same family.
That research shaped the whole structure. Activities run from lower complexity to higher, so younger children engage fully with the first half while older children find challenge in the second. Every spread is completable within a typical hotel stay — nothing needed beyond a pencil.
Fun for a six-year-old, within one of hospitality’s strictest brands
Four Seasons brand standards are among the most demanding in the industry. Typography, color, and visual language all had to stay within approved parameters while still feeling accessible and fun to a child. That’s a genuine design tension: the instinct to make children’s content loud, colorful, and playful runs directly against a brand that communicates through restraint, elegance, and negative space.
The solution was to let the illustrations carry the energy while the layout, typography, and color system stayed within brand. The pages feel warm and inviting without ever breaking the visual discipline Four Seasons requires.
Seattle as a child would want to see it
Every image in the book is original illustration. The cover shows the Space Needle rising above Pike Place Market, a Washington State Ferry crossing the sound, the Olympic Mountains behind — all bathed in warm afternoon light. A love letter to the city that works for a guest who has never been here and for a local who has seen it a hundred times.
Interior spreads each carry their own scene — the Sleepy Octopus coloring page, the Seattle Freeze crossword, a word search hidden inside a skyline outline — every one its own moment while staying part of a single coherent illustrated world.
Zero revision cycles
Delivered print-ready files with zero revision cycles — on a project combining original illustration, strict luxury brand standards, an age-informed structure, and print production, completed in three months from brief to final files. Guest satisfaction scores improved and reported guest disruptions declined after the book’s introduction.
Zero revisions on something this complex isn’t luck. It’s the result of front-loading the thinking and getting alignment on direction before execution, rather than discovering problems during review.
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