Its been a bit since I’ve posted a blog update but what better reason to break the silence than to show off two finished projects for our friends at Brinker International! If you’re not familiar with the Brinker name - they are a restaurant group that own and operate all Chili’s and Maggiano’s restaurants. Last June I was brought on to help them realize two projects at their brand new HQ in Irving, Texas. The first was an over 100 foot long heritage wall that contained milestones and highlights from their company history from 1977 up until today. And the second project was creating a flagship conference room to commemorate the first Chili’s restaurant location ever, in Greenville Texas.
As you can imagine the heritage wall was quite a meaty project (pun intended) - so I called on my good friend Kellen Merrill to set the tone with some really fun copy. And luckily enough, Brinker decided to go with the always awesome Skiffmade to fabricate the heritage wall components, and as you can see from the photos, they did such a great job! The install team at Ocelot also did a great job installing everything. We also had the insanely talented Joe Swec hand paint the wall graphics. He painted the illustrations in a semigloss so as you walk down the hall they shine, which was such a cool detail. This project was a real group effort and required over two weeks to install. And as you can tell by the finished product - we had a lot of fun working on this one!
For the conference room, I wanted to play off the original Chili’s aesthetic, but modernize it and funk it up a bit. Many of the design details are riffs on the original Greenville location and the first store design Chili’s implemented back in the 70’s and 80’s but with a little twist. The patterns on the walls are inspired by the Mexican tiles that were on the original Chili’s table tops, and of course there had to be an epic gallery wall, since that was always a mainstay at every original Chili’s. We also used copper lights to call back to the iconic copper chili pot lights used in the original Chili’s, and used long wooden spoons for handles on the credenza. I can’t say I didn’t get hungry working on this one!