Gustavus Inn × Leatherius Woodman – a leather stamping study
From the Practice Log – an ongoing series of stamping studies on real-world marks.
A August study.
Gustavus Inn greets its visitors with one headline: "A Tranquil Retreat at the Gateway to Glacier Bay." The claim is geography before it is marketing. The farmhouse stands on five and a half acres in the center of Gustavus, Alaska, surrounded by Glacier Bay National Park, with dock and airport access close by and ocean views beyond the meadow. Inside are thirteen bedrooms and a hearth room; outside, two organic gardens and a greenhouse. The site's own phrase for the setting is "on the edge of wilderness," and the property agrees with it.
The history runs deep for a town this small. Jack and Sally Lesh bought the inn in 1965; David and JoAnn Lesh kept it from 1980 until 2021, when they sold it to the Hoonah Indian Association, which described the purchase as establishing a presence in Hoonah Lingít homelands. In 2010 the James Beard Foundation named Gustavus Inn an America's Classics honoree and wrote of three generations of one family welcoming guests to a farmhouse at the edge of a meadow overlooking Icy Strait. The food reporting from those years reads like a good pantry – fresh-caught Alaska seafood and sourdough rolls with rhubarb jam, while the desserts leaned on the inn's own raspberries.
As found
The current website carries no drawn logo; the header is simply the name set as text. So the first half of this study presses the words exactly as the inn wears them – GUSTAVUS INN in quiet letterspaced capitals, run lengthwise so the name lies flat and wide, the way a meadow does.
Two renders, both blind deboss. Forest green answers the olive the site uses for its interface accents and the evergreen in its hero photograph. Caramel is farmhouse timber, and the oldest luggage color there is.
The mark this study proposes
This is a proposal and nothing more; the inn has managed since 1965 on plain words, and there is an honest case for leaving them alone. Still, the inn already owns the sentence, and we wanted to see it drawn. One unbroken line crosses the mark. It begins level, the waterline of Icy Strait. It lifts into a single peak and comes back down. Further along it lifts once more, smaller and steeper, into a gabled roof with a square chimney, then settles out into meadow and runs off the edge. Mountain and farmhouse share one horizon – "on the edge of wilderness," drawn literally – with GUSTAVUS INN beneath the line and AT GLACIER BAY smaller under that.
Three tags, lengthwise, all blind deboss. Forest green again carries the olive accent. Caramel carries the timber. Gray sand, a pale warm greige, carries the glacier-country sky that hangs over all of it.
The open door
For the small pieces we drew a companion to the main mark. A door frame stands upright with its leaf swung open, and through the opening runs the same horizon – level water rising into one peak. The gateway of the headline, made literal at pocket scale. On a keychain the pairing is almost too neat: the fob that carries a key shows the door it opens.
Two renders in forest green and caramel, blind deboss, stamped below the rivet.
Guests reach Gustavus by plane or boat, so passport covers belong in this study. The same open door presses onto the front of each cover, blind deboss on every color. Blueberry is the navy of Icy Strait water; gray sand is the pale sky over it. Carry the doorway out, and it marks the way back.
We made this out of love. Leatherius Woodman is on a mission to create and share artifacts of beauty, craft and love – this study is one of them, and we hope the feeling is mutual. Every image is a render – how we prototype before cutting a die.
If you're Gustavus Inn and you'd like these made real, or anything here changed – say hello through our contact page.