How to take an established restaurant and highlight what makes it stand out while creating a unique visual vignette for its mezzanine customers? With a healthy dose of creativity, research and elbow-grease.
The Founding Farmers location in Maryland had a mezzanine level faced with an expanse of blank ductwork, which made for an unattractive dining experience on the second floor. We were tasked with telling the story of the American Farmer and accomplished this by highlighting five real life families in different parts of the country, each with distinct barns. We chose a monochromatic color scheme to allow for the design to live as an appropriate backdrop to the rest of the mezzanine. Aside from being visually interesting, the barns’ linear components helped hide the vents coming off the ductwork.
The client also wanted a wall installation in the main dining area to act as an additional branding opportunity. For this section, we developed individual signs – some painted, others stained, some with engraved letters, others three-dimensional – and hung them together to create a dimensional wall panel. The colors scheme was matched to existing interior booth fabric and helped tie the piece together to the rest of the restaurant.
This project won a HOW Promotional Design Award and is featured in HOW Magazine’s September 2013 edition.
photography by Stephanie Breijo
