Cafe Bebo Booth at Bar Convent Brooklyn
Brooklyn, New York
For Cafe Bebo’s booth at Bar Convent Brooklyn, the team and I transformed a compact 200 sq ft space into an embodiment of the 1920s Cuban speakeasy aesthetic. In true creative fashion this booth started as a quick napkin sketch at a bar and materialized into a detail rich design that was part coffee shop and part speakeasy to evoke the brand’s illicit ambiance.
* Work completed as part of OSK New York
Conceptualization & Design
In order to design a booth for an alcohol tradeshow our team it only seemed logical to begin our design session at a bar. With a drink in hand and twenty minutes later we had the initial sketches on the concept. The challenge in such a small space was how to make the speakeasy aspect of the booth feel secretive without fully enclosing the space. To give distinction between the two halves we employed the use of a darker, more muted color palette for the speakeasy side to contrast the bright red of the coffee show. We refined our design using SketchUp and selected materials that evoked the speakeasy era and the Cafe Bebo brand.
Brand Integration
With a strong brand identity developed for the marketing campaign we fortunately had a lot of source material to work with. Drawing inspiration from the secretive imagery used in the marketing campaign we deployed polaroid cameras within the booth to capture visitor, black out their eyes and display corkboard wall. Small touches like records as serving trays and bird cages further brought the Cafe Bebo aesthetic to life.
The Cafe Bebo booth at Bar Convent Brooklyn was a triumph of creative and strategic execution. Visitors were drawn into a narrative journey, experiencing the allure of a bygone era while engaging with the brand in a memorable way. The project not only met our client’s objectives but also stood as a testament to the power of interdisciplinary collaboration and innovative design thinking. Looking back, this project underscores the importance of a cohesive vision, from conceptualization through to execution, and reinforces my belief in the transformative power of experiential design to engage audiences and elevate brand narratives.
