Yeo Valley Cafe
The brief Design walk-through
The brief for the new space was to create an
engaging, inviting showcase for Yeo Valley,
incorporating a dine-in café, grab’n’go produce
and a mini retail store, as well as a work and
meeting space on the site’s upper storey.
The designers were asked to maintain and
express the brand’s nature-inspired ethos
and friendly, fun and unpretentious feel,
whilst also creating links to the existing HQ.
This included integrating the work of artist-
illustrator Natasha Clutterbuck, who has a
long association with the brand and whose
murals are part of the Blagdon Canteen, as
well as creating artwork for special editions of
the product range. The new café-store has two street-facing,
retail-style, full-height boutique windows to
either side of the main double-door entrance,
with backlit storefront branding above for
The Yeo Valley Café, using the brand’s existing
heart-shaped identity. On the inside of the
store, the backs of the windows are dressed
in curved floor-to-ceiling timber panelling,
with hidden doors allowing easy access for
updating displays.
The interior features a dual ‘warm and cool’
concept, with a white and bright ‘cool’ area to
the right for grab’n’go produce and the mini
retail area, underlining the freshness of the
dairy produce range, and a warmer ‘natural’
sit-down area to the left, underlining the
brand’s countryside origins and authenticity.
the World Of Hospitality 51
A central off-white flooring corridor is for
circulation and unites the spaces, with a
feature flooring apron to both sides in a black-
and-white, star-patterned Spanish Hex tile
with a matt finish. White, horizontal timber-
style slats line the upper walls and the angled
ceiling, whilst an eye-catching, huge-scale
ceiling feature down the centre of the space
takes the form of a stained-glass-style light-
box installation, showing an abstracted map of
the Yeo Valley farm HQ in Blagdon.
‘We wanted to avoid the cliché of a whited-
out or black-sprayed ceiling’, Emma Gullick
explained.
‘The angled outer edges were designed to
echo the inside of a farm building roof, whilst