Brand Book
Maison Hibou
Where the work happens
Identity
Palette
Sunwashed Ochre
#D4A76A
primary
Notebook Teal
#5B8A8E
secondary
Paprika Accent
#C85A3C
accent
Flour Cream
#F7F3E8
background
Pencil Graphite
#4A4A48
neutral
Faded Indigo
#7B8FA8
neutral
Canvas Light
#E8E3D6
neutral
Ink Black
#1A1918
neutral
Typography
headline
Sabon
Weights: 400, 500
body
Akkurat
Weights: 400, 500
accent
P22 Operina
Weights: 400
Voice
We write like we're leaving notes for friends in the margins — conversational, specific, unafraid of texture. Sentences breathe. We name the exact shade of afternoon light, the particular crumb of a kouign-amann, the way pencil graphite smudges under a palm.
- “The 7am regulars claim the corner table before we've flipped the sign — laptops open, notebooks spiraling outward, a small civilization of coffee cups by 9.”
- “Our kouign-amann: all shatter and butter, edges dark enough to argue about.”
- “Tuesdays we pin new postcards to the cork board. Somewhere in those layers is a ticket stub from 2019, a recipe for cassoulet, someone's grocery list in purple ink.”
Do
- Use sentence fragments when they land
- Name specific materials and textures
- Write in present tense observation
- Let white space create rhythm
- Cite the particular over the general
Don’t
- Never use 'elevate your experience'
- Skip 'artisan' and 'curated'
- No questions as headlines
- Avoid corporate softening phrases
- Don't explain the obvious
Positioning
TaglineWhere the work happens
MissionWe hold space for the city's makers — writers mid-draft, artists between commissions, anyone who needs a corner table and won't be rushed.
Market positionaccessible
DifferentiationWe occupy the gap between the polished specialty café (performance space for latte art) and the coworking warehouse (productivity theatre with hot-desks). Maison Hibou is the third space that doesn't meter your time or curate your presence — you claim a corner at dawn with your notebooks and no one clears your table until you're done. We compete on creative atmosphere, not efficiency metrics or Instagrammable moments; our regulars build small civilizations of coffee cups by 9am and the margins fill with sketches by evening.
Audience
Freelance designers and early-draft novelists in their late twenties to mid-forties who've turned the corner table into a second office, arriving with tote bags heavy with library books and leaving behind pencil shavings. They're the ones who know which seat gets the best morning light and have a standing pastry order by name.
Essence
Maison Hibou began in 2011 when a rare-book dealer inherited a narrow corner building on rue de Verneuil and couldn't decide between opening a reading room or a café—so she built both, installing a La Marzocco between the philosophy stacks and commissioning walnut tables long enough that strangers became collaborators by proximity. The owl, carved into the building's 18th-century lintel, became our quiet mascot: watchful, nocturnal, at home in both solitude and lamplight.
consideredhospitableeruditeunhurriedwarm-litobservant
Values
- Hospitality
- The table is held, the lamp stays on — we create conditions for thought, not obstacles to entry.
- Discernment
- Every book we stock, every record we play, every pastry we serve has survived a question: does this deepen the room?
- Porosity
- Borders blur by design — the novelist shares the table with the student, the café funds the bookstore, the day dissolves into evening without announcement.
- Accumulation
- Richness through layering, not curation for the camera — the patina on brass, the margin notes in used books, the sediment of creative hours.
- Ritual
- The small ceremonies that make work possible: the pulled shot, the claimed corner, the 4pm light, the moment the music shifts at dusk.
- Restraint
- We hold space, we don't perform it — no chalkboard manifestos, no brand theater, just wood and light and the work people bring.
Logos
primary
Primary lockup — owl perched on books with handwritten wordmark
monogram
Monogram — nested initials in sketched circle
mark
Standalone owl icon — sketched symbol only
secondary
Standalone owl icon — sketched symbol only
Visual direction
Style
Mediumphotography
AestheticDocumentary photography shot wide (28mm) in golden-hour ambient light, embracing grain and the imperfect archaeology of use — flour dust in backlight, pencil marks on marble, the small beautiful mess of a long creative afternoon. Every frame captures rooms mid-life, not styled: mismatched chairs, book stacks with visible spines, brass hardware mid-patina, walnut grain under warm pooled light. The camera treats wear as beauty and lingers on process rather than polish.
Look
Lightinggolden hour perpetual, warm amber pooling through tall windows, deep shadows preserved not lifted, single-source practicals (brass banker's lamps, candle glow), low contrast with rich blacks, late afternoon through evening gradient
Optics28mm environmental establishing shots, 50mm equivalent for intimate tablescapes, shallow depth of field f/2.8 when isolating hands or spines, gentle subject separation not blown-out bokeh, medium-format detail rendering
Textureswalnut grain under fingertips, linen napkin weave catching sidelight, paper tooth of uncoated stock, brass mid-patina neither polished nor oxidized, espresso crema micro-bubble structure, flour dust suspended in shaft light, leather spines with craquelure, graphite pencil on toothy sketch paper
Surface qualitylived patina not distressed styling, honest wear at table edges, natural accumulation (wax drips, cup rings as history), matte unvarnished wood, soft-hand fabrics with drape weight, non-reflective except metal highlights, tactile invitation not untouchable preservation
Feel
Moodgolden hour that holds, amber light through wine glasses, the satisfied fatigue after good conversation
Energylow hum, steady rather than still — the gentle metabolism of focused work
Paceunhurried afternoon bleeding into evening, the tempo of a long read
Moodboard
Shooting recipes
- Walnut grain under banker's lamp — 50mm, f/2.8, shallow depth isolating table texture, overhead angle 45°, single brass banker's lamp pooling amber from upper left, warm 2700K practical source, deep shadow falloff right edge
- Corner window bay golden hour wide — 28mm, f/4, environmental depth rendering mismatched chairs to window frame, late afternoon side window flooding warm amber left to right, gentle gradient into shadow, 3200K golden hour quality
- Hands-in-process tableside portrait — 50mm, f/2, tight waist-down framing on hands and immediate workspace, ambient window light from above-left supplemented by practical desk lamp, warm mixed 2900K, soft modeling shadows
- Backlit flour dust viennoiserie — 50mm, f/2.8, half-subject framing with selective sharpness on pastry flake detail, strong backlight shaft through window catching suspended particles, warm 3400K contre-jour, minimal fill from reflected surfaces
- Brass and book spine archaeology — 50mm, f/2, macro-intimate on material patina and text details, single-source lamp glow raking across surfaces from side, 2700K amber highlighting metal and leather texture, deep shadow contrast
- Evening transformation wide interior — 28mm, f/2.8, full-room environmental with visible depth from foreground tables to back wall, multiple amber practicals—banker's lamps, candles—creating pooled warmth across space, natural twilight blue through windows mixing cool/warm, 2800K dominant
Cast
Characters
Olivier
Mid-thirties, arrives at dusk smelling faintly of cigarettes and sandalwood. Slim-cut black trousers, white oxford with sleeves rolled to forearms, scuffed brogues. Plays the upright in the corner Thursdays through Saturdays — Monk, Coltrane, his own compositions. Between sets, reads Camus at the bar with a glass of red wine.
The Translator
Indeterminate age (somewhere between thirty-five and fifty), claimed the back corner booth as permanent office. Surrounded by stacked dictionaries — French-Italian, English-German, a battered Larousse. Wire-rimmed glasses, wool cardigans over linen, ink stains on fingertips. Mutters to themselves in three languages, emerges only for more coffee.
Anaïs
Twenty-eight, occupies two pushed-together tables most afternoons, surrounded by trace paper, T-square, mechanical pencils in a worn leather roll. Black turtleneck and paint-speckled denim, heavy silver rings, dark hair in a perpetual topknot secured with whatever's at hand. Sketches elevations while underlining passages in Bachelard's *The Poetics of Space*.
Marguerite
A woman in her late fifties with silver-streaked hair pinned loosely with a pencil, wearing a tobacco linen shirt under a canvas apron perpetually dusted with espresso grounds. Wire-rimmed reading glasses hang on a brass chain. She moves between counter and tables with coffee refills, remembering everyone's preferred cup and manuscript deadline, speaking in soft French-accented English.
Léon
Early forties, always claims the corner table by 7 AM. Wears the same rotation of five wool sweaters over chambray shirts, corduroy trousers worn thin at the knees. Tortoiseshell glasses, perpetually needs a haircut. Works longhand in Moleskines, orders a single espresso that goes cold by page three, stares out the window between paragraphs.
Sophie
Thirty-two, manages the floor-to-ceiling shelves in the back room. Vintage floral dresses under oversized men's cardigans, Doc Martens, round tortoiseshell glasses. Knows every spine, hand-writes recommendations on cream cardstock, leaves them tucked in relevant volumes. Drinks Earl Grey from chipped Limoges, argues passionately about translation choices.
Locations
La Bibliothèque (The Back Room)
A narrow, high-ceilinged room behind the espresso bar where floor-to-ceiling shelves hold a semi-curated jumble of French literature, art monographs with cracked spines, architecture texts, cookbooks bloated from kitchen use, and orphaned volumes left by patrons over decades. Three brass reading lamps with green glass shades cast pools of warm light onto a long refectory table scarred with pen marks and coffee rings. The air smells of paper dust, lemon oil, and the ghost of yesterday's cigarettes (from before the ban). This is where translators spread dictionaries, where book groups argue over wine on Thursday evenings.
The Cobblestone View
What unfolds beyond the tall windows: Rue de la Chouette, a narrow side street of honey-colored limestone buildings with wrought-iron balconies, uneven cobblestones that catch rain in their valleys, a bakery's striped awning two doors down, the green pharmacy cross blinking at the corner. In morning, delivery vans double-park while drivers argue cheerfully. In evening, streetlamps ignite one by one, turning the cobblestones amber. Bare plane tree branches tap the windows in wind. This external world—visible but separated by wavy antique glass—frames the interior sanctuary and reminds patrons they are in Paris, in a specific arrondissement, on a particular corner where light and stone and chance converge.
The Corner Window Bay
Southeast corner of the building where two tall casement windows meet at ninety degrees, flooding a cluster of mismatched chairs—cane-backed bistro seats, a velvet armchair with exposed wooden arms, two bentwood café chairs—in morning and afternoon light. The light carves geometric shadows across worn oak floorboards, catches dust motes above open notebooks, and turns coffee steam into amber ribbons. This is where the novelist sits at 7am, where the architecture student claims an entire marble-topped guéridon by mid-morning, where strangers share the small round table by the radiator on winter afternoons.
The Jazz Corner (Evening Transformation)
After 8pm, the café contracts and deepens: overhead lights dim, the reading lamps glow warmer, a small platform in the northwest corner (usually stacked with returned books) becomes a stage for a double bass, a piano, sometimes a clarinet. Candles in mismatched holders appear on tables. The espresso machine quiets; wine bottles and vintage coupes emerge. The same physical space—same scarred tables, same mismatched chairs—becomes a different country: intimate, amber-lit, filled with the conversation of upright bass and brushed snare. Regulars who arrived at dawn for coffee return for Sancerre and standards. The owl motif tiles above the bar seem to watch differently in this light.
Le Comptoir (The Counter)
A twenty-foot expanse of walnut counter, its surface worn concave in places by a century of elbows and cleaning rags, bearing the circular ghosts of ten thousand saucers. Behind it: a vintage Faema E61 espresso machine in brass and chrome, its grouphead permanently stained, its drip tray scarred by decades of portafilter knocks. Shelves behind hold hand-thrown ceramic mugs (no two alike), glass jars of sugar cubes, a wooden box of vintage silver spoons. Above, a brass rail suspends handwritten menu cards on butcher's hooks. This is the spine of Maison Hibou—where orders are taken, where regulars are recognized by their usual, where the barista becomes bartender when jazz begins at 8pm.
Products
Sac Hibou
Natural oatmeal linen tote with reinforced canvas straps and a sketched owl monogram screen-printed in charcoal ink on one side. Large enough for a laptop, two paperbacks, and a baguette. The fabric softens and wrinkles beautifully with use, becoming a badge of belonging among regulars.
Les Mugs Atelier
Hand-thrown stoneware mugs in cream, sage, and charcoal with irregular fingerprint glazes and uneven lips. Each piece subtly unique, sized generously for café crèmes and Americanos. The clay shows through at the rim where the glaze pools thicker at the base, carrying the memory of the potter's hands.
Cartes Postales
Letterpress and risograph postcards by local illustrators and printmakers, sold in a wire rack by the register and pinned in layered collages across the back-room walls. Subjects include Parisian street scenes, literary quotes in hand-lettering, abstract compositions, and recurring owl imagery. Patrons buy them to send or simply to tack above their desks.
Mélange Nocturne
A medium-dark blend of Colombian and Ethiopian beans roasted weekly by a 5th arrondissement micro-roaster, packaged in recycled kraft bags with a hand-stamped owl and handwritten roast date. Notes of dark chocolate, hazelnut, and burnt caramel — strong enough for the 6am crowd, smooth enough for evening sipping during jazz sets.
Carnets Hibou
Cloth-bound A5 notebooks in linen and faded cotton with cream laid paper and sewn signatures. The cover bears a minimal debossed owl silhouette. Left behind by a patron, adopted by the next — each contains fragments of someone else's thoughts in margins and flyleaves before you claim its blank pages.
Viennoiserie du Matin
Croissants, pain au chocolat, and almond financiers from a neighboring boulangerie, served on mismatched antique platters — floral porcelain, tarnished silver trays, chipped majolica. Arranged without fuss on the counter each morning, dusted with powdered sugar that catches the window light.
Applications
