The brief arrived in a single email, three sentences long. Mikhail Petrov, the founder of what would become Terroir Wine Bar, wrote: “I’m opening a wine bar on Patriarch’s Ponds. I want it to feel like it’s been here for forty years. I don’t want anything that looks like it was designed yesterday.” That email became the foundation of the entire project. We didn’t need a twenty-page brief. We needed those three sentences, because they told us everything about Mikhail’s instincts — he understood that a good wine bar, like good wine, should carry a sense of place and time. Our job was to give visual form to that understanding.
We spent the first two weeks not designing anything. Instead, we researched. Elena Korsakova, our lead designer, pulled apart the visual history of French wine culture: the catalogues of Négociants from the 1880s, the engraved labels of Burgundy estates, the hand-lettered menus of Parisian bistros that survived two world wars. Nina Reznikova, our strategist, spent a full day at the bar’s future location, mapping the neighbourhood’s character — the old linden trees, the pre-revolutionary facades, the particular quality of light in the courtyard where the terrace would sit. We interviewed Mikhail’s sommelier about the wine list’s philosophy. We spoke with the architect about materials. By the end of those two weeks, we had filled a 90-page research document and hadn’t drawn a single line.
The first design direction was wrong. We pursued an approach rooted in minimalism — clean sans-serif type, a reduced colour palette, generous whitespace. It was elegant. It was tasteful. And it was utterly generic. It could have belonged to any upscale venue in any European capital. Mikhail was polite about it, but we could hear the hesitation in his voice during the presentation. He didn’t need to say “no” — we already knew. The second direction leaned too far in the opposite direction: ornamental, maximalist, heavy with illustration. It felt like costume rather than character. We scrapped both directions and went back to the research document. The answer had been there all along; we had simply been too focused on the aesthetic surface to see the structural idea underneath.
The breakthrough wasn’t a visual idea. It was a structural one: every touchpoint should feel like it was printed, not designed. Printed fifty years ago, discovered in a drawer, still beautiful.
The breakthrough came on a Tuesday morning. Elena was studying a scan of a 1920s French wine merchant’s trade card — a small piece of ephemera, roughly the size of a business card, with fine engraved linework and a restrained typographic hierarchy. She noticed that the card didn’t feel “designed” in the contemporary sense. It felt printed. There was a crucial distinction there. Modern design announces itself: look at these choices I made, look at this grid, look at this colour theory. But the trade card simply existed. It was a functional object made with craft, and its beauty was a byproduct of precision, not intention. That became our guiding principle: every touchpoint for Terroir should feel like it was printed, not designed. Printed fifty years ago, discovered in a drawer, still completely beautiful.
Execution became a matter of discipline. We chose a single typeface — a transitional serif with roots in 18th-century French punchcutting — and used it across everything: logo, menus, signage, coasters, business cards. No secondary typeface. No display font for headlines. Just one family, used at different sizes and weights, with the hierarchy created through spacing, case, and weight rather than variety. The colour palette was equally austere: a deep, warm paper tone as the base, a single muted green (pulled from the oxidized copper gutters on the building next door), and black. Three colours total. The linework was inspired by copperplate engraving — fine, consistent, decorative but never frivolous. Elena drew every element by hand before vectorizing, so the lines would carry a slight organic irregularity that laser-perfect Bézier curves cannot replicate.
We produced 47 coaster variations. Each one features a different wine region with its own engraved vignette. Regulars started collecting them. That was never part of the brief — it was a consequence of caring about details that most studios would outsource.
The delivery spanned every physical touchpoint of the space. The menu system was designed as a series of loose cards held together by a leather folio, so individual cards could be reprinted when the wine list rotated seasonally. The exterior signage was etched brass, oxidized to match the building’s patina. The coasters — which became unexpectedly iconic — were letterpress-printed on uncoated stock, with 47 different variations, each featuring a different wine region and a small engraved vignette of the landscape. Regulars began collecting them. Mikhail tells us that people sometimes ask for specific regions. That detail was never in the brief. It was a consequence of caring about a touchpoint that most studios would have treated as an afterthought or outsourced entirely.
The project won the Golden Bee award in 2023, which was gratifying but, honestly, secondary to the thing that mattered more: the bar opened, it filled up, and the identity became inseparable from the experience. You cannot imagine Terroir without its visual language. The engraved linework, the warm paper tone, the precise typography — these elements don’t decorate the space, they are the space, in the same way that the wine list and the courtyard and the sommelier’s knowledge are the space. When Mikhail said he wanted it to feel like it had been there for forty years, he was describing not a style but a relationship between a place and its identity. That relationship is what we designed. Everything else — the coasters, the signage, the award — followed naturally from getting that relationship right.