Great design tells the story of your bar or brand (and makes it delicious)

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“Melbourne, to me, has always been where food and design meet,” says Lauren Bonkowski, and it’s an opinion that I happen to agree with. From old school Italian joints with chequered tablecloths and Chianti bottles covered with melted wax on Lygon street, to the bright lights and patterned ceramics of Chinatown and the pared back minimalism and quirky illustrations of modern wine bars, you can see Melbourne’s culinary story at a glance.

Design and hospitality are intrinsically interwoven, with every choice made in the process of opening a venue – chairs and glassware, menu design and branding, the bottles on the back bar – creating identity and having an impact on your guests’ experience. It's not a coincidence that so many creative people are drawn to the hospitality industry.

Lauren is a case in point, as she has used her background in hospitality to help build a career as a much-coveted designer, working with brands such as Maidenii and Pirate Life and as the head of design for Melbourne Food and Wine Festival. She is also a co-founder of, and the creative force behind, Marionette liqueurs.

“My hospitality career has been dotted with venues where creativity and product quality are the priority over commerce,” she says. “The most formative was a ‘garden-party’ bar designed by an architect with experience in opera stage design. There, the sense of theatre was everything. We donned tennis outfits. A brick lane snaked through the room. We served hot punch full of premium rum from teapots kept warm with crochet covers made by the host's elderly mother. In my mind, the best hospitality venues offer moments of escapism from the everyday; places that allow people to be playful.”

This idea of creating an experience threads through all of Lauren’s work. “I’ve found with hospitality and alcohol brands that I was often lucky enough to not have to clarify the importance of design. When starting out I would fumble through workshop sessions to lock in the client vision, tone of voice, and the pieces that would form the building blocks of the visual language. But even without me there, right from the beginning founders were often clear-minded that their story was the key.”

She got her start in-venue, “animating crocodiles for a very over-the-top website button, commissioning obtuse poetry for their menu, and desperately trying to find a supplier to make custom metal cufflinks for staff uniforms,” before starting to work on brand identities. For Pirate Life, for instance, one of her first projects centred around the brewers making a cross country road trip to start their brewery, taking everyone along on the journey with them. “They really knew that, yes, the beer was important – but that the lifestyle brand that they were going to build around it needed to be equally as strong,” explains Lauren.

As much as we would like to say we are impartial to branding and marketing and judge a product purely on its merits, it's just not true. Having done many a blind tasting, I can attest to this – brands that are your absolute favourites often score a little lower than you would think, and ones that you dismiss as daggy perform better than you give them credit for. But (unless the liquid in the bottle is actually bad) at the end of the day it's the brand story that sells it, first to bar managers and buyers, and then to the public.

While Marionette liqueurs are undoubtedly delicious, I think Lauren deserves a lot of credit for their success. They’re great products, and backed up by a whimsical design, colourful characters and cheeky social media, they have captured the imagination of bartenders.

“For Marionette, having me as a designer within the team has been a strength as I speak liqueur shorthand, and understand the brand so innately,” says Lauren, but working on your own brand is not without its challenges. 

“You’d think working for clients with a vision that is not your own would be harder than having free rein. It’s not. When designing a brand for yourself it’s all too easy to get lost in the infinite aesthetic options available to you, without the parameters that you would have otherwise worked through as part of a traditional design process. And to add to that, practicality and cost is often front of mind,” she elaborates. 

“It says a lot that I’ve been working on a Marionette brand update for over two years now. Our story, I’m clear on. We know who we are and we’re generally good at communicating our brand vision. But the package itself? It has taken an inordinate amount of time to balance priorities and bring the design back to the core of what we stand for. I think this rings true to many who have tried to do it solo. Whether packaging or interiors, it's so very important to have a professional in your corner who can filter the noise, make sense of who you are and tell your story clearly from the onset.”

She takes constant inspiration from other creatives within the industry: “It’s Jason Pho’s perfect colour combos and sweet lofi illustrations for Mauritian restaurant Manzé. It’s Rupa Anurendra's band-style graphics for Earth Angels wine bar takeovers. It’s Claire Ainsworth’s timeless and expertly crafted linocuts for the cover of the Bar Merenda wine lists celebrating the produce of the season. It's such a joy when the visuals build so perfectly upon the core offering by a chef/bar owner/food-obsessed human.”

It's creativity that drives our industry and there is more than one way to go about it, but communicating a clear storyline to your guests or customers is front and centre. Ultimately, says Lauren, “creativity and design is such a commodity in food and drink and I feel very lucky to be able to work with a foot in both camps.” 

I feel lucky that she’s here to make hospitality a little brighter and more playful.

Around the Bars

• I was asked to sit on a panel for Young Gun of Wine, tasting Pinot Noir Shiraz blends. While single varietal wines have long been prized above all else in Australia, this blend is starting to capture the imagination – as one winemaker on the panel said, it just works. They ran the gamut from light, floral and chillable to some more seriously structured wines, with the best examples integrating the juicy fruit and herbal notes of Pinot Noir with the spice backbone of Shiraz. Definitely a category to watch, and a lot of them are pretty pocket friendly for your summer wine list. Subscribe to the Young Gun newsletter to get the full run down when it drops.
• After tasting so many red wines, a refreshing cocktail was in order, so we headed to Black Kite Commune. I had the Mooyah, which coincidentally uses Marionette pineapple alongside rum, peach and mango champagne syrup, lemon and rosewater to mimic the chemical flavour composition of a Quandong – an extremely delicious science experiment. My friend’s Southside was pitch perfect. Plus, the wild boar croquettes are to die for. They’re open from 4pm every day which makes them the perfect reliable CBD spot for well-executed drinks.
• I got sent a bottle of 23rd Street Distillery’s newly released whisky, and I’ve been going back to it quite often since! It’s super soft and approachable, majority ex-bourbon barrels with a few ex-tawny in the mix for depth and richness. A very good everyday sipper to get through the last chill of a Melbourne winter, and at a great price point. I have to say, their 8% whisky and cola RTD went down a bit too easily as well.

The Boothby Drink of the Year Awards are back for their third year, highlighting the great work of the nation’s best bartenders over the course of the last 12 months. This isn’t a cocktail competition — this is a recognition of the great drinks bars actually serve. There is no other awards program like it — entries are open now and close 11:59PM AEDT October 11th. Enter at boothby.com.au/drinkoftheyear now.