Torrey Hills

Torrey Hills Campus Brand Identity System – Breakthrough Properties San Diego, California

A collage of architectural and interior design images showcasing modern office buildings, interior workspaces, and outdoor recreational areas including a park with people enjoying the space.

Two buildings. One identity.
A system built to scale.

Brief

Breakthrough Properties develops life science campuses for the world's leading biotech and pharmaceutical companies. Torrey View and Torrey Plaza — their two buildings in San Diego's Torrey Hills — needed a brand identity that could work as one unified system, while remaining distinct enough for each property to hold its own. But there was a harder problem underneath.

Modern building with large glass windows and a sign that reads 'Torrey View by Breakthrough.'

The problem

The existing Breakthrough identity – developed for their Boston property
– wasn't working in physical space. The graphic language was too complex, too cold, too difficult to apply across signage and wayfinding.

Aerial view of a coastal neighborhood with modern white buildings, residential houses, and a highway, with the ocean and hills in the background.

And there was a competitive pressure: Alexandria Real Estate, the dominant player in the San Diego life science market, was positioning around scale and authority. Bigger, louder, more institutional.

Breakthrough wanted the opposite.
Not a whale. A jewel box.

Architectural sketch of a future urban project with labeled views: 'Future Project' on the left and right, 'Torrey View' and 'Torrey Plaza' in the center with hand-drawn mountain and cityscape backgrounds.

The positioning

Life science campuses are typically designed around function – labs, loading bays, infrastructure. The brand follows: clinical, corporate, anonymous.

Torrey Hills proposed something different: that the environment scientists work in shapes the work they do. That a campus which feels considered, calm and human creates better conditions for creativity than one that feels like a logistics facility.

The brief put it directly: "Science is truly a creative endeavor. We want to provide a space and format for scientists to create."

The identity needed to reflect that belief.

The idea

The Torrey Hills landscape is defined by one thing: the Torrey Pine – one of the rarest trees in the world, native to this specific stretch of California coast. Twisted by wind, shaped by terrain, unmistakably of this place.

The mark abstracts the layered terrain of the hills into a system of forms – grounded, geological, quietly distinctive. Jewel tones with gradient depth replace the cold corporate palette of the previous identity. Warm metallic accents connect the brand to the material language of the architecture.

The result: a visual language that feels rooted in place, not imported from a brand manual.

Modern living room with a textured gray wall, wooden paneling with hanging Edison bulbs, a black metal wall art piece, a shelf with books and decorative objects, a large potted plant, and an orange sofa with white cushions.

The system

Each building gets its own variation of the core mark — Torrey View in blue diamond, Torrey Plaza in royal sapphire — while sharing the same structural logic. The system was designed from the start to accommodate five or six future Breakthrough properties across the US and globally, with each new location able to adopt the same architecture while expressing its own local identity.

Simple enough to apply at every scale. Distinctive enough to own a place.

Brochures or flyers showcasing modern architectural buildings with images of people working in office spaces and outdoor scenes of a residential complex with green lawns and a playground.

Dark blue promotional card and envelope for Torrey View by Breakthrough, with minimalistic design and gold text.

A brochure and a box from Torrey View by Breakthrough show the brochure partially out of the box, with descriptive text visible.

Multiple brochures with abstract mountain landscape designs in navy blue, gray, orange, and cream colors.

In space

The identity was implemented across the full campus — lobby signage, wayfinding, glass applications, printed materials and leasing collateral. Working in physical space meant every decision had to survive real conditions: scale, light, material, distance.

This is where many brand systems fail. Forms that look clean on screen become ambiguous on a 3-metre wall. Colours that work in print disappear on frosted glass.

The Torrey Hills system was built with these constraints as the starting point, not an afterthought.

Interior of a contemporary room with two abstract landscape paintings on a gray wall, a wooden chair with a white and black fabric, a silver floor lamp, and a potted plant.

The result

A brand identity system deployed across two live campuses in San Diego — scalable, material-aware and built to grow with Breakthrough Properties as they expand.

Not a logo for a building. A system for a company finding its identity across America.