# Style Family: premium-luxury

**Signature**: Restrained palette, elegant serifs, generous whitespace, subtle motion, products treated like objects.
**Reference products**: Aesop, Hermès, Apple Music, Apple Newsroom, Linear (when in marketing mode), Loro Piana.
**Best for**: hospitality, fashion / beauty, high-ticket SaaS marketing, art galleries, boutique e-commerce.

## Token defaults

### Color
- **Primary**: muted, often *not* a vivid color — deep brown, ink black, forest, oxblood, brass.
- **Background**: warm off-white, cream, sand, or pure white treated with intent.
- **Accents**: minimal. A single underline color, a metallic touch.
- **Avoid in this family**: saturated brand blues, neon accents, gradient backgrounds.

### Typography
- **Heading**: elegant serif or contrasted display — GT Sectra, Tiempos, Newsreader, Söhne Breit, Canela, EB Garamond.
- **Body**: serif or refined sans — Söhne, Söhne Lebenslauf, Aktiv Grotesk, Inter at low weights, Tiempos Text.
- **Sizing**: large display headlines (5–8rem on landing). Body stays at 16–18px.
- **Letterspacing**: slight negative tracking on display headings (-0.02 to -0.04em).

### Radius
- **0 / 2 px**. Curves cheapen this family. Buttons rectangular. Cards rectangular.

### Spacing
- 8px base, scale 8 / 16 / 24 / 40 / 64 / 96.
- Density: very spacious. Whitespace is the signal of value.

### Shadow
- None or extremely subtle (1px hairline borders preferred over shadow).

### Motion
- **Slow and intentional**. 400–800ms easings. Fade with slight upward movement on scroll.
- No bounces. No celebrations. Confident and quiet.

## Anti-patterns *within this family*

- Rounded buttons / pills.
- Saturated CTA color competing with content.
- "Get started for free" CTA copy. Premium copy is more reserved — "Discover", "Begin", or just the product name.
- Multi-column dense layouts. One column, one focus.
- Stock photography. Either custom or none.
- Trustpilot badges, social proof bars, "as seen in" logo strips. (These belong in other families.)
- Sale stickers, urgency timers, comparison tables.

## Typical surfaces

This family does well on:
- Brand homepages
- Product detail pages (single SKU treatment)
- About / heritage / craft pages
- Editorial-style product stories

This family does poorly on:
- Functional dashboards (the spacious style wastes screen)
- Settings panels (reads as cold and unhelpful)
- Forms with many fields (whitespace amplifies tedium)
- Mobile checkout (vertical sprawl)

## Notes

Premium is largely about *what you remove*. If the page feels busy, it's wrong. The most common failure mode is treating premium as "modern-minimal but with a serif" — the spacing, sizing, and motion are all different.