Altarea is a French real estate group focused on urban transformation, with a multi-brand offering spanning housing, retail, business space and renewable energy [1]. The company was founded in 1994 [2]. Its corporate identity has historically been built around a distinctive purple square, a device that also anchored the visual identities of its subsidiary brands.
Design and History
The Altarea group logo is a square purple symbol, a format that was shared across the group’s companies [3]. Brand asset data lists the primary purple as hex code #5A2882, a shade identified as “Eminence” [2]. A yellow accent color, hex #FDC949, is also documented among the group’s brand colors [2].
In 2009, Altarea Italia announced a logo restyling that followed the strategy of the French parent group, then known as Altarea Cogedim. The new logo adopted a light purple, described as the same color used across all Altarea group companies. According to the announcement, this purple resulted from mixing two colors: the red of the old Altarea Italia logo and the blue of Altarea Cogedim [3].
The purple square became so closely associated with the group that French trade press referred to it as the “carré violet” (purple square). In 2025, the group’s housing brand Cogedim underwent a strategic transformation led by the agency Babel. As part of this rebrand, Cogedim moved away from the purple square toward a more statutory logo with its own graphic identity and an enriched color palette built around its signature color [4][5]. The rebrand accompanied a strategic move to consolidate all of the group’s new housing expertise under the Cogedim name [5].
Meaning and Symbolism
The most concrete documented meaning relates to color: the light purple adopted in 2009 was explicitly described as a blend of the red from Altarea Italia’s previous logo and the blue from Altarea Cogedim, unifying the group’s companies under a single color [3].
Typography and Design
The 2025 Cogedim rebrand by Babel is the only design attribution confirmed for a brand within the Altarea group [4][5]. The agency W is listed among agencies working with Altarea, but no source confirms W designed the Altarea logo itself [6].
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