Image Credit : All photography by Sharrin Rees.
Project Overview
The Corner by McCafe is a “future Lab” for McDonalds, a place to test, experiment and meet their public face to face as they evolve in the new millennium.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Landini Associates is a multi-disciplinary design and brand consultancy consisting of strategic planners, architects and interior, graphic and product designers. We produce world class, simple yet effective work that lasts. We are interested in the classic over the fashionable and many of our projects have a longevity that exceeds the market norm. Strategically driven but creatively led, we are equally at ease inventing new brands as we are evolving and redefining existing ones. We bring about a fusion of multiple disciplines resulting in an end product with a singular vision. This results in the best possible outcome for both our clients and their customers.
Landini Associates is based in Sydney and is currently working in North America and Canada, the UAE, the UK, Asia and Australia. Clients include Loblaws, T2 (Unilever), Jones the Grocer (LVMH), Harrods, Amore Pacific (Primera, Mamonde, Innisfree, Lirikos), Hilton Hotels, Westpac Bank Australia, Jurlique, Crumpler, McDonald’s, Burt’s Bees (Clorox), Coles, Woolworths and various independents.
Project Brief
The brief was to be part of a program to challenge McDonalds and extended to the naming, graphics, packaging, uniforms and interiors.
This is a Future Forward project whose purpose is to stretch the brand beyond its comfort zone, to reach new customers and position the brand in the ‘fresh & fast food market’.
McCafé wanted to evolve whilst remaining legitimate and true to its core values of simple good food, great prices, convenience and accessibility.
The Camperdown site will be a one-off project, a hothouse, a living lab used to experiment with a new brand experience and ever evolving offer.
Potentially, some of the more successful elements may be integrated into other McCafé stores, enriching and up-scaling the existing food and beverage offer. Our approach was to design a great local café, not an evolution of McCafe. Working with such a global brand thus required a determinedly blinkered approach, one that looked to the local neighborhood and not the past.
Project Innovation/Need
The most innovative aspect to this project is the food. McDonalds have used their experience and inventiveness to bring world-class café style food to the table for incredible prices.
Our job as designers was to support this with an environment that made the food the hero and to help challenge the publics and staff’s perception of this brand by creating a local and unexpected solution.
This innovation was an immediate success, loved equally by the staff and customers.
Design Challenge
A core principle of our design practice is to create interiors that last. We seek the “classic” over the fashionable, the quiet over the loud. The result is that many of our project’s life expectancy is twenty years plus, exceeding the norm by a multiple of three.
Delivering this for a brand that is known for being the opposite to this - fast, loud and ever changing -was a challenge, but one the client embraced. The project is more transparent than its predecessor’s with open kitchens and serveries allowing the food to be cooked and served in full view. Honest real materials provide a simple backdrop to the incredible new food and the success has been immediate, with new and existing customers, young and old, enjoying both great value and a peacful environment.
Sustainability
Throughout the interior we have used classic, honest and raw materials that will last. We have designed to create something special that will last as part of the local community. This is a studio philosophy that allows for sustainable design, and one that we applied when designing The Corner by McCafe.
Interior Design - Hospitality
This award celebrates innovative and creative building interiors, with consideration given to space creation and planning, furnishings, finishes, aesthetic presentation and functionality. Consideration also given to space allocation, traffic flow, building services, lighting, fixtures, flooring, colours, furnishings and surface finishes.
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