The Vine House
A home for the soul, made visible.
A brand identity and website for a faith community built around whānau, presence, and belonging — designed to feel like an open door for everyone who walks through it.
A comprehensive brand strategy and website designed to cut through the insurance industry complexity and continue a trusted referral conversation, not start a new one.
The Strategic Challenge
The Strategic Challenge
Most faith communities look like institutions. For people wary of religious structures — or those who've never felt like they belonged in one — that's enough to keep the door closed before it's ever opened.
The Vine House is different. They're a community built around whānau, presence, and a faith that shows up in everyday life. But their existing brand identity didn't say any of that. It was incomplete, outdated, and disconnected from the community they were actually building.
The brief was to make it feel true — and to establish The Vine House as the grounded, nurturing root from which all their future initiatives could extend.
Personalised Insurances (PIL) is a new venture from the trusted advisors at Personalised Mortgages. Their most valuable asset is their warm referrals — families who have just secured a major asset and have already placed their trust in the Personalised brand.
The challenge? To create a digital front door that didn't break this chain of trust. A generic website would create immediate friction, undermining the value of their referral system, and forcing them to build trust from zero with every new client.
Our Approach
Our Approach
Lead with feeling, not function
The audience The Vine House is trying to reach — people wary of institutions, families looking for a village, young people searching for direction — don't need to be informed. They need to feel something. Every creative decision was made in response to that, with the client actively involved throughout to ensure the work stayed true to who they actually are.
Roots, not rules
The Vine House needed to feel like the stable, nurturing centre of something. It needed to be a brand that could hold future initiatives within the same family without those initiatives losing their own identity. The identity was built to function that way from the ground up.
Our goal was to create a digital presence that not only looked beautiful but acted as a strategic tool to qualify leads and showcase their unique design philosophy.
Bringing it to Life
Bringing it to Life
The visual direction was built around warmth, groundedness, and belonging. A palette of warm earth tones that feel grown rather than chosen. Typography pairs a quiet serif with clean supporting text, balancing elegance with readability. Textures draw from woven mats and natural forms, grounding the identity in the cultural fabric of the community. Photography leans candid and light-filled. Real people, real moments, nothing staged or stiff.
The website was designed as TVH's digital home, carrying the same warmth and welcome as the physical community. Not a noticeboard. A front door that feels like it's always held open.
A versatile logo system designed for both digital and print applications. or The custom product page, designed to reduce friction and increase trust.
The Result [& Recognition]
The Result [& Recognition]
When the work came together, The Vine House team said it simply felt like them. That it conveyed who they are visually, in every way. That it captures what their community is truly about: whānau and presence.
For a community whose entire purpose is to make people feel genuinely welcome — especially people who might be wary of what church typically looks like — that response is the outcome that matters most. Their brand identity now does the work of communicating belonging before anyone walks through the door. Since launch, that's been reflected back by the community itself, with people sharing genuine love and connecting with the identity in a way the old brand never managed.
The new brand gave the Sage Studio team the confidence to pursue larger contracts, knowing their identity finally matched their ambition.