The Hub
— Concept, naming, identity and spatial design. A creative destination for architects and designers, now in three Belgian cities.
Helping architects and designers to discover, feel and experience materials.
Design is not just about looking at materials; it’s about feeling them, experiencing them, and using them to shape something new. The Hub is where that happens.
The specification market — where architects, interior designers and project developers discover, evaluate and select materials, surfaces and furnishings — is one of the most relationship-driven sectors in the built environment industry. Decisions are rarely made online. They are made through touch and texture, through the experience of seeing materials in context and in combination, through spaces that inspire rather than simply inform.
Across Belgium and the Netherlands, premium design and materials brands were each investing in their own individual presence — showrooms, events, catalogues — with limited reach and limited impact. The opportunity was clear: bring the right brands together under one roof, in one destination with a strong enough identity and experience concept to make it genuinely worth visiting. The question was not whether the market needed it. The question was how to build something that would make architects and designers choose it over everything else competing for their attention.
SKINN developed the concept, the name, the brand identity and the full spatial experience for The Hub in close collaboration with the client — building a market proposition from the ground up rather than improving something that already existed.
The strategic starting point was the positioning: not a trade showroom, not a materials library, but a creative playground — a destination where design professionals come to be inspired, to feel and experience materials firsthand, and to think differently about the projects they are working on. That concept gave The Hub a personality and a promise distinct from anything else in the market.
From that foundation, we developed everything. The name. The visual identity and brand system. The spatial concept and interior design — a sequence of curated environments that each tell a different story about materiality, craftsmanship and design thinking, with 33 brands integrated into a coherent whole rather than placed side by side. Wayfinding, environmental graphics and digital touchpoints were developed as part of the same integrated system, ensuring that every interaction with The Hub — before, during and after a visit — reinforces the same experience.
The concept launched in Ghent, where it quickly established itself as a reference destination for design professionals in the region. That success created the foundation for expansion: The Hub now operates in Antwerp and Brussels as well, bringing the same curated spatial experience to Belgium's three most important design and architecture markets.
The Hub is a destination that did not exist before SKINN conceived it — and one that has grown from a single location in Ghent into a three-city network across Belgium's most important design centres. Thirty-three premium design brands now share a platform with the identity, the spatial quality and the editorial point of view to be genuinely chosen by architects and interior designers at the highest level of the built environment sector.
For any client looking to develop a new market proposition, launch a multi-brand destination concept or build a spatial brand experience from zero — in the design, real estate, materials or built environment sector — this is what it looks like when strategic thinking and spatial creativity combine to create something entirely new.
