Priory Wareham is a hotel, restaurant and bar in Wareham, Dorset. Its guests are loyal, many of them returning for 30 years. The Priory wanted to welcome a younger generation without changing what its regulars came back for. In 2024 we were brought in to rebrand the hotel, its restaurant and its bars and to rebuild its website. We have worked with the Priory ever since.
The service and the food were exceptional, but the brand had not kept pace with them. To secure its next 30 years of guests, the Priory needed to reach a younger generation with different expectations from the guests who had been coming back for decades.
The risk ran both ways. Modernise too hard and the loyal guests feel the place has changed. Change too little and the new audience never notices it.
We split the brand. Priory stayed the main brand for the hotel: classic, with a modern take on what was already there, so existing guests could see it evolve rather than disappear. The Garden Room restaurant and the Cloisters and JJ's bars each got a sub-brand of their own. That gave us room to speak to different audiences without changing the hotel itself.
Each sub-brand has its own colour, typeface and illustrated emblem:
Classic typography and simple illustrated emblems hold the family together. The content does the tailoring. Cloisters has since merged into JJ's.
The work started with a discovery workshop in July 2024 with the Priory's team: how guests see the hotel today, who the ideal guest is and how that guest should feel from first finding the hotel online to checking out. A moodboard and brand concepts followed. We delivered the brand guidelines in November 2024.
Our background is in architecture as well as digital design, so we treated the website as part of arriving at the hotel. The user flow followed a stay: rooms in the Main House and the Boat House, then the Garden Room menus and reservations, then what's on at the bar.
The Priory had a strong push on social media and valued good photography and video. That let us design the site like a curated lifestyle magazine. Polished photography sits alongside social and guest content, layered through the site to build up the atmosphere of the place.
At the centre is Priory Life, an online magazine of articles about life at the Priory. The articles feed into the rest of the site, next to the offers for each part of the hotel. The Priory has standards: a dress code, an etiquette and a formal level of service. The content shows that side. It also shows the relaxation, comfort and fun.
The Priory has an internal team who wanted to manage the content and have some design control themselves. So we built the site on WordPress with Elementor, set up to be easy to use without being technical. A page builder carries more code than a hand-built site, so we offset that through ongoing performance work.
That is a different choice from the headless build we made for Venari Partners. The right platform depends on who runs the site day to day.
The site went live in January 2025. The partnership has continued since. Our monthly support keeps the site healthy and secure. Since launch we have built landing pages and improved the site's performance.
In November 2025 we added a social gallery. It brings together three kinds of content: photography curated by the Priory, images and videos from guests and Priory Life features in between. The team adds and edits posts from a tab in the website dashboard, the same way they manage events.
We have also drawn illustrations for the Priory's printed marketing. Those illustrations are now moving onto the website, with motion added, for new pages for The Garden Room, JJ's and the homepage.
When other agencies work on the Priory's marketing, we look after the brand so their work stays consistent with it.
The Priory has been named a Michelin Key hotel for 2026 and Hotel of the Year 2025 at the Food Lifestyle Awards, as listed on its website. Those awards belong to the Priory's team.
“I am SO happy with this and think it is my absolute favourite page on the website. I haven’t seen anything like it anywhere.”
Katie Hart, Priory Wareham, on the social gallery
If you run a hotel or restaurant and your brand no longer matches the experience, our Brand Architecture and Modernise Infrastructure pages explain how we work, or you can email studio@mouriaux.com.
Written by Tom Le Mesurier, Principal, Mouriaux.
