One of the newest additions to Philadelphia’s Schulson Collective, Alpen Rose is an intimate steak restaurant that forgoes the macho trappings of the typical steakhouse. With a jewel-box-sized bar, tinkling chandeliers and romantic lighting, it’s not your typical porterhouse purveyor.

Given only the name, we conducted a strategy workshop session to fully understand the client’s hopes for the project and get to know how this restaurant falls into their portfolio of other dining experiences. Through an in-depth strategy session, the insights we were able to focus on was this idea of sparking wonder. We chose to play up this approach of surprise and design through the lens of a cabinet of curiosity, and because this restaurant was meant to be geared more towards a female demographic, what better way to bring the story full circle than creating a rich narrative with a female world-traveling botanist as the protagonist.

For a uniquely immersive experience, we created a fictional world based on a female botanist from a bygone era who travels the globe in search of the elusive Alpen Rose. This world inspired details throughout the space that surprise and delight—from an index card cocktail menu to flowers frozen in ice cubes. A system of multiple logos in different styles suggest billheads collected from exotic locales, and a richly layered menu system recalls a collection of botanical research.

Through the dining experience and the immersive space, guests are meant to feel like they are in her workshop, surrounded by a museum-like collection of books, trinkets and other items found on her previous expeditions. The story comes to life through touchpoint like the menus which are meant to reference various papers and forms that she’s collected over time. By personifying this visual direction, we were able to justify having a toolkit of many logos for the restaurant to use interchangeably which harken back to the creative and free-spirited personality found in our botanist.