The Cold Store · Creative Direction — Two Worlds

The brief

Two ways to put fire in a cold store.

The building was made in 1911 to keep things frozen; Ingrid is going to cook everything in it over live fire. Both worlds take that contradiction literally — one from the building’s substance, one from its signage. Neither softens it.

The hidden heart

“She is not opening a restaurant in an old building. She is putting her grandmother’s workplace back into use, on its own terms.”

Solveig packed herring here in the 1950s, at fifteen; she said the cork walls sweated in summer. The severity is the respect.

Grounding — from the research dossier

The building is a 1911 dockside ice house with its original cork-slab insulation, a zinc-topped bar, and one enormous cast-iron door. Restoration kept every slab that could be saved; the rest were cut into the bar front. The material story is already finished — the design’s job is not to invent one.
The name is stencilled on the cast-iron door in white paint, and was deliberately not repainted. This is the single most important fact in the brief: the identity exists, physically, and the only correct move is to leave it alone and reproduce it faithfully.
The room is Edinburgh’s food trade, the national restaurant press, the Leith dock community, and the fishing families who supplied the old ice house. Three of those four groups will recognise the boat names before they read the menu.
“Industrial preservation, not industrial pastiche.” The client’s own framing: a Donald Judd room, or the way a good conservation architect leaves the repair visible. The distinction rules out every warm-rustic move a restaurant opening usually reaches for.
Solveig is ninety-one and coming. Her name is to appear once, somewhere, without sentimentality — she would hate it. A table, and nothing more than that.

Direction A · the world of the material

The Salvage Slab

“The invitation is a piece of the building.”

Cork insulation, ochre and granular, with everything pressed into it and no ink at all — because Ingrid kept every slab she could save and cut the rest into the bar front. The identity is not drawn onto the cork; it is a shape cut out of it. The guest feels it before reading it: a thumb over the impression at the door.

Anchor detail

“Nobody expects cork to be beautiful and it is the whole material story of this building.”

Where this could go at invitation stage

Inkless — impression only, so the card has to be turned to the light to be read.
Cork is the colour; no second ground is introduced anywhere in the suite.
One ember, at the edge — dry pigment sunk into a cut edge, seen from the side and never on the face.
Cut, never decorated — the cut corner is the only repeated device across the suite.

Choose Direction A if the thing you most want a guest to do is touch the paper.

Stock: Uncoated cork-toned board, 600gsm
Print finish: Blind deboss, no ink. Ember painted once, on the cut edge only.
Signage & space: Cork offcuts routed with the table names, hung on the zinc wall
Digital: Flat ochre field, type pressed in shadow only — no glow, no gradient

Direction B · the world of the mark

The Painted Mark

“The invitation is the door.”

A white mark sprayed through a stencil plate and bled at the edges — because the name on the cast-iron door has never been repainted, and Ingrid was right not to. The mark is reproduced, never redrawn; a cleaned-up vector version of it is explicitly refused. Ranged hard, like a shipping mark, because that is what it is.

Anchor detail

“The name is stencilled on the cast-iron door in white paint, and we did not repaint it.”

Where this could go at invitation stage

The mark is white paint, so it takes the dark ground — the pieces that stand for the building are set on ice, and the pieces you pick up and read at arm’s length keep the zinc board.
White is reserved for the paint alone. Not even the name takes it: on ice the name is set in zinc, so the one white thing on any surface is the mark.
Marks, not ornament — the mark appears exactly once per surface, never mirrored or duplicated.
Bleed is the craft: the paint runs under the plate edge, and that edge is allowed off the trim.
One ember per piece, and never as a word — at text sizes it fails on both grounds, so the heat is a rule of ink.
The stock should feel as cold in the hand as brine-etched zinc looks.

Choose Direction B if the building already said it and the job is to not get in the way.

Stock: Two, and the ladder says which: uncoated ice board 600gsm for the invitation, welcome signage and table cards; uncoated zinc-grey board for the menu, bar list and place cards.
Print finish: Opaque white screen print, double hit, on ice. The same mark blind-debossed into the zinc pieces — never redrawn, only inked differently. Flat pieces: no folds, no die-cuts, no liners.
Signage & space: The name stencilled straight onto the brick in the same white, with no board and no frame
Digital: Flat ice field; the mark at scale, the type beneath it, nothing else

The suite in this direction

Invitation — ice board, the mark cropped by the trim on three sides, the name below the paint in zinc.
Menu Card — zinc board, the mark small and blind at the foot; the ember rule marks the fire course and nothing else.
Bar & Drink Menu — narrow zinc card, mark at the head, the fino and the Leith beer given equal weight.
Welcome Signage — stencilled straight onto the wall; the mark at full scale, and the only piece where it is not cropped.
Place Cards — guest name above the 14pt floor, the mark at a quarter size beside it.
Table Cards — ice board, the boat name only, and the mark dropped entirely. Solveig’s identical, and no larger.

Palette

#EFE6DC

#B4653A

#3A2C22

#C4622B

The Salvage Slab

Cork slab ochre leads · bracken ink for words · one ember, painted on a cut edge and seen only from the side.

#2F3A40

#D9DEE0

#FFFFFF

#C4622B

The Painted Mark

Ice owns the ground where the mark has to read; zinc owns the working paper and every word set on ice · stencil white reserved for the mark alone · one ember per piece, spent as a rule and never as a word.

Typography — Hanken Grotesk · Fraunces

The Cold Store

Opening Night · 14 November

Direction A leads with Fraunces — a serif cut for paper, not for screens, because it holds an impression without ink behind it. Direction B leads with Hanken Grotesk set tight: a grotesk with no warmth to offer, which states the fact and stops, exactly like the door does. In both, the other family is demoted to tracked-caps support lines and never allowed to lead. Lining numerals throughout; oldstyle would be a different building.

Refused, on the client’s instruction

Six things that are not here.

Drawn flame, ember-glow gradient, any fire imagery — the heat is implied, never drawn
Fish or lobster line-drawings — every seafood restaurant in Britain has one
Snowflake or ice-cube motif — “the building was a cold store, it was not a fairy tale”
Chalkboard lettering, “artisan” script, kraft-paper rustic, exposed-Edison-bulb warmth
A letterspaced serif used to signal expense
A cleaned-up, vectorised version of the stencil mark

Approved

Direction B — The Painted Mark

The cork direction was the more tactile object, and it lost on the strongest possible ground: the identity already existed. The door has carried this mark since 1911 and Ingrid had already made the only real design decision — not to repaint it. Direction B does the one thing that respects that, which is to reproduce it exactly and then get out of the way. The cork survives anyway; it is the bar front, and it is the reason the room is the colour it is.

The Cold StoreTwo Worlds

Two ways to put fire in a cold store.

The Salvage Slab

The Painted Mark

Six things that are not here.

Direction B — The Painted Mark