The importance of being Ernest

In East African hospitality, competitors of all shapes and sizes prowl at every turn. Jack Cousins reports on how the redesign of family-owned Hemingways Collection sets a benchmark for originality and personalisation in the sector.

In a remarkable turnaround in the five years since the Covid-19 market crash, travel and tourism is experiencing a renaissance. Estimations for 2025 suggest an annual global growth rate of over 5%, with some research organisations even predicting a consistent – and highly lucrative – 7% annual growth all the way to the end of the decade.

Despite this seemingly strong worldwide growth, some destinations are set to fare far better than others. With Europe’s recovery locked in at around 4%, and the US market stuttering in recent months, a growing portion of jet-setters are travelling to more unconventional locations. Few holiday destinations are quite as fashionable right now as Africa, with a large portion of these travellers opting for sub-Saharan countries.

This is perfect news for Hemingways Collection, a luxury hotel brand with properties scattered across East Africa that was founded by British entrepreneur Richard Evans in the late 1980s. Inspired by the iconic US writer Ernest Hemingway, who adored fishing along the idyllic Kenyan coast, Evans founded his first retreat in the small town of Watamu.

By the early 2010s, the business had found its place within the region’s tourism ecosystem, adding safari camp Ol Seki Mara and a boutique luxury hotel in the country’s capital, Nairobi. “The business was very pioneering at the time. Though people thought building a luxury hotel in Nairobi was mad, it's proven to be very successful,” says Ross Evans, son of founder Richard and now the CEO of Hemingways Hospitality.

With the further addition of a second Nairobi property, Eden Residence, in 2022, Evans believes Hemingways Collection has come to be recognised as a “big beast” in local terms, despite being independent and family-owned. However, its position has since come under threat, with both JW Marriott and The Ritz-Carlton opening retreats on the Maasai Mara in 2023 and 2025 respectively.

This development, which coincided with Hemingways’ plans of acquiring another Kenyan safari camp and venturing into the Rwandan market, meant the time had come for the ambitious company to undergo a comprehensive rebrand. If it wanted to remain top of the food chain, Hemingways would require an identity that could set the benchmark for luxury African travel.

Competition on the savannah

“To be honest, we didn't really have a brand identity,” says Evans. “We had a style guideline and an idea of how we should look and feel, but we didn't have a clear strategy.” To elevate its brand presence while still preserving its heritage, the company called on UK-based creative consultancy Greenspace, which had previously worked with both Kenyan organisations and London-based hospitality firms.

The process wasn’t all plain sailing, however, and the two teams needed to come to a mutual understanding of what the business actually represented. To the client, it was clear Hemingways was an organisation that brings international standards of luxury to East Africa. But to Adrian Caddy, Greenspace’s founder and CEO, this wasn’t quite the case.

His team divined that the quality of service in East Africa simply wasn’t comparable with that of world leaders like Dubai or London. “Instead, it has its own unique flavour: the people you meet are super charismatic,” Caddy explains. “They’re very proud and personal – perhaps a little more so than somebody who's been impeccably trained by one of the big hotel franchises, which operate under very rigorous guidelines.” While Evans recalls the “shocked faces” when this verdict was delivered, he now accepts it was exactly what they needed to hear.

Hemingways’ strong character would therefore be leveraged by Greenspace as a means of setting its luxury hotels and safari lodges apart from the burgeoning competition. Pointing to the group’s unique charisma and history, Greenspace adopted “Always Original, Always Personal” as a guiding philosophy for the project.

Caddy explains, “I think that idea provided a little strand of DNA that then underlined how to enact the design work. We felt the brand needed to be quite authentic – as if it was crafted and handmade – with a real personality to it.”

Standing out from the herd

Along with the brand’s undeniable charisma, it was also already differentiated by its commercial offering. While most competitors purely market themselves as a safari experience, Hemingways also has its city properties, which afforded the group a degree of design flexibility.

“We're not a hard brand,” says Evans. “We don't have a brand guideline that says you need 40 square metre rooms in every asset, for instance. The new brand idea allowed us to retain that ethos of every property being slightly different and independent, having its own character driven by the people who are in those properties and not by the head office.”

This is evidenced by the evolution of Hemingways’ preexisting palm motif, which remains ubiquitously displayed throughout the collection. 

While distinctive in nature, Greenspace reimagined the design such that it now reflects its properties through unique aesthetics. The colour of the frond, for instance, is adapted for each type of retreat (blue for coast, green for city and red for safari), while grass, wave and urban textures help tie the sub-brands to their locations. A muted steel grey is reserved for the masterbrand that threads the new identity together.

Elsewhere, the typography harks back to Ernest Hemingway, by adopting a script typeface inspired by the author. To maximise a sense of craftsmanship and authenticity, an early 20^th century grotesque is combined with refined serifs. This approach was then extrapolated throughout the tone of voice, website, brochures, maps, factsheets and on-property application guidelines.

Reputation is key

With well over two million travellers having flocked into the country last year, tourism now comprises around 7% of Kenya’s GDP. And with the big players from more developed nations starting to realise the potential of setting up shop both in Nairobi and on the savannah, the image of hospitality brands – particularly those that market themselves as luxurious – is more important than ever.

Not all companies have succeeded in that respect. Just months after opening its opulent 20-suite tented camp in Kenya's Maasai Mara National Reserve, the Ritz-Carlton was sued by a local environmentalist for allegedly blocking a critical wildebeest migration corridor. With the case still ongoing as of January 2026, many people have posted negative reviews of the camp on Google, citing the concerns of conservation groups.

Fortunately for Hemingways, its excellent public reputation made Greenspace’s job of centring the revised brand around authenticity possible. Another positive outcome of the project, Evans says, was the galvanising impact the rebrand left internally. The importance of ensuring staff are fully invested in the company and its goals cannot be underestimated at a time when thousands of Kenyans are vacating the hospitality industry to pursue better-paid jobs around the world. If Hemingways and other independents are to survive amidst the arrival of well-resourced challengers, they must remember the value of adopting brands which speak to all stakeholders.

While hopeful the recently launched rebrand will resonate with big trade partners, Evans is particularly excited to see the response from loyal guests. “One of the groups that Greenspace spoke to when researching was an Australian family who've been coming to Hemingways Watamu for over 30 years,” says Evans. “They're probably our longest standing guests and are due to arrive in Kenya in the next few days. It'll be interesting to see how they react to the new brand touchpoints around the hotel. I'm sure the feedback will be very positive.”

This article was taken from Transform magazine Q1, 2026. You can subscribe to the print edition here.