Svenska Brasserier — Shaping the brands behind the restaurants where Stockholm eats, meets and gets seen.
Svenska Brasserier is behind some of Stockholm’s most established restaurants, places where food, art, business and media have mixed for decades. I worked closely with the group over many years, across Svenska Brasserier itself and several of its restaurants. I was creative lead throughout, from brand and communication to digital and physical experiences.
The brand behind the brands
Their restaurants are layered places. Classic kitchens meet contemporary art and music, often with work that is deliberately provocative or open to interpretation.
For Svenska Brasserier itself, we did the opposite.
The identity became unusually direct and over-explanatory, leaving very little to interpretation. That clarity was balanced by a house typeface based on hand-drawn letters by Swedish artist Jockum Nordström, bringing some of the warmth and eccentricity of the restaurants back into the system.
The result was a brand that could represent the group without trying to imitate any one of its restaurants: established and dependable, but with enough personality to show that this was not an ordinary hospitality company.
Building the brand from the inside
Some of the work most people never saw mattered just as much. For Riche and Sturehof, we turned staff handbooks into carefully designed pieces of brand communication rather than administrative documents. For Svenska Brasserier, the same thinking went into the printed budget books we created each year.
The idea was simple: if hospitality depends on the people delivering it, the brand should feel just as considered on the inside as it does to a guest.
A different kind of food market
Stockholm food market (Stockholms Matmarknad) gave us the chance to build a food concept from the ground up.
The market revolved around a central octagonal bar, so the octagon became the organising device across the identity, from the logo to signage and the physical environment. Even the wordmark could change, with letters replaced by food-related symbols.
We deliberately stayed away from the expected brown-paper-and-butcher aesthetic. Instead, I commissioned illustrator Tyra von Zweigbergk to create a cast of strange vegetables and animals that appeared across wayfinding, food grading, wrapping paper and bags.
A little classic, a little odd, and much more like the place itself.
