Terrace Club
The mission
The Bord Gáis Energy Theatre sits on Grand Canal Square, an unmissable landmark in the Dublin Docklands. It hosts theatre, dance, comedy and musical events from national and international performers.
The Terrace Club is a gorgeous jewellery-box of a space at the very highest level of the building for only its most generous patrons. It acts as a private lounge for the top Bord Gáis Theatre Circle Club membership tiers and is also exclusively available for members’ own private events. What they needed from Neworld was a brand identity for the space that matched and conveyed its aspirational opulence.
The question
How do you brand something as subjective as “atmosphere”?
By definition, any members-only space is about access and exclusivity. Here, there’s an added layer of cultural sophistication: these are people who care a lot about the arts. We were branding a specific atmosphere, designed to appeal to this specific audience.
The idea of an atmosphere is something totally ephemeral. But if you can break it down to its components, you can begin to see what makes it unique. The Terrace Club has the swagger of a speakeasy and the buzz of a big night out: champagne, cocktails, canapes and conversation. It is a sanctuary of private space: luxury and comfort, far from the madding crowd and gives the members that sense of being “in the know”, quite literally in the inner circle.
The process
Reflecting on those atmospheric ingredients, we found a strong direction for the design. We could see immediately that there should be a close marriage between the Terrace Club interior and the graphic design of the brand.
With a spectacular gilded bar and equally glamorous fixtures and furnishings, it has a very strong art-deco/jazz-age aesthetic, set off by some striking contemporary twists. Our job was to transcribe that aesthetic and atmosphere into a brand language and express it for print and digital communications.
The transformation
We developed The Terrace Club Brand identity around the glam black-and-gold colour palette of the bar itself. We also drew inspiration from the pattern on the club’s bespoke carpet: a series of trapezoids with angles reflecting the theatre’s unmistakable architectural facade.
At this level of design, high-end finishes are everything, so we brought in beautiful textures, embossing and foiling at every turn, to create pieces that offer the promise of this gorgeous, glittering space.
