Azora: when trust becomes a creative language

Since 2024, a number of projects connected to Azora have allowed Permanent State of Creation to take an active part in the visual positioning of very different properties, all sharing the same ambition: to find what makes each one unique and turn it into an identity capable of being seen, narrated and remembered.

Some collaborations respond to a single project. Others, over time, make it possible to build something more valuable: shared knowledge.

Our story with Azora began in 2024 and has since led us to work across different moments and transformation processes at several of its properties in Portugal.

Doing so alongside one of Europe’s leading investors in hospitality & leisure has given us a close view of an approach to the sector based on value creation, active management and asset repositioning. Since 2011, Azora has managed more than 106 hotels and 26,300 rooms, with €3.3 billion invested in hospitality.

Within that context, our work has had a goal that goes far beyond producing photography or film: to take an active part in building the positioning of each property within the luxury segment, and to translate that evolution into a visual language of its own. We are not looking for different projects to share the same visual signature. We want each one to find its own.

In the Algarve, Vilalara Grand Hotel Algarve has allowed us to develop a creative universe that has evolved alongside the property. Architecture, interiors, gastronomy, lifestyle, film and storytelling have progressively broadened its visual language, also giving rise to campaigns such as Eu Sou Lara and The Gift of Crossing Paths. The aim has not only been to showcase an exceptional resort, but to help build a contemporary perception of luxury deeply connected to the landscape, to wellbeing and to the Algarve way of life.

Further north, in Vila Nova de Gaia, across the river from Porto, the challenge was completely different. The rebranding of The Lodge as Forte de Gaia, Autograph Collection, posed one of our greatest challenges: to accompany visually the birth of a new identity and its entry into Marriott’s Autograph Collection universe, while preserving the property’s deep connection with Gaia, the Douro and wine culture.

Here our work could not be limited to producing a new image library. Photography, gastronomy, lifestyle and film had to help explain what had changed, what remained and what the hotel’s new ambition was. The destination became an active part of the story, and content became a tool to support both the rebranding and the positioning of Forte de Gaia within the luxury segment. This search also gave rise to The First Emotion, a campaign built around a universal emotion: discovering a place for the first time.

On the Atlantic coast, Praia D’El Rey Marriott Golf & Beach Resort, near Lisbon, once again presented us with a different scale. Azora added the resort to its portfolio in 2024 with the aim of strengthening its positioning and quality through new investment and operational improvements. The property brings together a five-star hotel operated under Marriott, golf, gastronomy, wellness and a significant residential and destination dimension.

Our creative challenge lay precisely in making that breadth visible: building a narrative in which ocean, golf, gastronomy, wellness, family, landscape and outdoor life would no longer be perceived as separate elements, but as parts of a single experience.

Three properties in Portugal. Three contexts. Three moments of evolution and three different creative responses.

This journey has reinforced a conviction at the heart of Permanent State of Creation: an image can be extraordinary and yet not be building the right positioning. That is why photography, film, art direction and storytelling cannot be conceived from aesthetics alone. They must also respond to where a property wants to stand, whom it wants to attract, in which markets it wants to be relevant and what perception it needs to build.

That is probably one of the things we value most about our journey with Azora: having been able to take part not only in the visual representation of different properties, but also in the evolution of how they want to be perceived within the new map of luxury hospitality.

And that is why this story is also a story of gratitude: to Azora, for the trust, the conversations, the challenges and the space to look for different answers for different projects.

Good creative relationships need ideas. Those that evolve over time need something harder to manufacture: trust.

And perhaps that is one of the most valuable results of working together over time: not only the photographs, films and campaigns created, but everything we have learned to build between one project and the next.