VELOUR: Hi-fi Listening Room
VELOUR is an invented listening bar: forty seats, a valve amplifier, a wall of records and one house rule, no talking during side A. Listening bars started in 1950s Tokyo as places where people came to hear an album properly, start to finish. The brief I set myself was to make that slowness feel luxurious, not dusty, and to build a system that could carry a weekly flyer as easily as a matchbox.
- Role
- Concept, identity, art direction & copy
- Scope
- Logo, poster series, print, social, signage
- Type
- Gloock, Fraunces Italic, Jost
- Palette
- Oxblood, midnight, brass & cream
The identity
A doorway, a V and a needle.
VELOUR
Hi-fi listening room
VELOUR
Hi-fi listening room
The idea
Step through the arch, slow down.
Most bar brands shout. A listening room should do the opposite: it asks you to put your phone away and give one record forty minutes of attention. So the identity borrows from the places that already do that well, the velvet-and-brass hi-fi lounges and concert halls of the 1930s.
The mark is an Art Deco arch, the doorway into the room, with a V drawn inside it like a stylus. A single brass dot sits where the needle meets the groove. It works as a full lockup on a menu and as a monogram stamped into a coaster, and it survives being cut out of neon tube.
The rules
- One arch, every size
- Brass is the only accent
- Serif for the night, sans for the facts
- One italic word per headline
- Info bar on every poster
- Never more than three colours
Luxury, here, isn't gold everything. It's the permission to listen to one whole album without anyone talking over it.
Color
Velvet, brass and late-night blue
Typography
A deco serif with a soft italic voice
Blue hour
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg 0123456789
after dark.
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg 0123456789
EVERY SUNDAY · 21:00
Aa Bb Cc Dd Ee Ff Gg 0123456789
The flyer series
Three nights, one grid, three colourways.
Sunday sessions
Blue
hour.
Jazz on vinyl, start to finish. Side A, side B, no skipping.
Second Thursdays
Bossa
after dark.
Rio, 1962, on the big speakers. Caipirinhas until the record stops.
Rare grooves
Analog
Fridays.
Soul, funk and B-sides you've never heard, played loud on warm valves.
Blue Hour (Sunday jazz) in midnight blue, Bossa After Dark in oxblood with a turning sunburst, Analog Fridays on cream. Same grid, same info bar, so a wall of them reads as one brand.
The poster system
Recognisable from across the street.
Every night gets its own colourway and its own deco shape: a moon setting through an arched window for Sunday jazz, a brass sun with turning rays for bossa, stacked arches for rare grooves. The structure never moves: brand and number at the top, an art moment in the middle, the title low, the facts in a ruled bar at the foot.
That means a new night can be designed in an hour, and after a month on the walls of the Old Bazaar the system is recognisable before anyone reads a word.
Print collateral
Things you hold while you listen.
- Side A9Mezcal, vermouth, cherry bitters
- Needle Drop8Gin, elderflower, brass-cold tonic
- Blue Hour10Rye, blue curaçao, smoked salt
- Long Play9Dark rum, coffee, slow-stirred
Ana Petrovska
Admit one
Bossa after dark
Light one,
play one.
The cocktail menu (each drink named for a part of the ritual), a numbered membership card, a ticket with a brass stub, a coaster with the address set around the rim, and a matchbox.
Signage & social
Glow above the door, rhythm on the feed.
VELOUR
open · listening
Tonight · 20:30
Bossa
after dark.
Now spinning: Getz / Gilberto, side A
Side A,
no skipping.
Nº 03
Rare
grooves.
The mark drawn as a single neon tube, an Instagram story for tonight's record, and a feed that cycles through the poster colourways.
Reflection
Premium is a matter of restraint.
VELOUR is a concept, and every name, member and drink in it is invented. What it demonstrates is the system: one shape and one accent colour, used with enough discipline that a matchbox and a three-metre neon sign feel like they came from the same hand.
Every piece on this page is built in code rather than exported as flat images, so the posters, the ticket and the neon are live, sharp at any size and quick to change for the next night.
