Vallée du Ciel
The old Romanian restaurant in central Brussels has its regulars and it works very well. What had aged was its image, and its name. So the project started by renaming it, then remade everything you can see: the lettering, the menus, the site.
- Client
- Vallée du Ciel
- Role
- Name, brand identity, menus and website
- Year
- 2025
It is the oldest Romanian restaurant in Brussels, and it had no shortage of customers. What it had was a perception problem, because the house was worth more than its shopfront and its printed matter suggested. The work was therefore run as a full rebrand rather than a website redesign, going all the way down to photographs of the dishes, which did not exist in any usable quality.
A name written by hand, an identity built like postcards
Vallée du Ciel is written by hand, in a traditional script that says where the house comes from. Everything else follows from that: the identity is built as a series of paintings and postcards recalling the home town of Carmen, the owner who founded the place. The menus were entirely remade, with traditional Romanian motifs and visual adaptations that belong to the country rather than to restaurant decor. The blend is always the same one: modernity laid over tradition, never the other way round. The identity does not stop at the screen. It carries onto the sign, the window, the cards and the tote bag, and that is where a handwritten name is really tested: it has to stay legible large on a façade and small at the foot of a menu. The traditional patterns tie those surfaces together without ever becoming decoration that would smother the food. A restaurant is looked at from the pavement before it is read at the table.
- New name and hand-drawn identity
- Website aligned with the art direction
- Full menus, traditional patterns included
- Photography of the dishes and the room
- Business cards
- Shop window visuals and signage
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Discovery
We start with a real conversation about your project: where it comes from, who it speaks to, what already exists around you. We analyse your competitors, because an identity that looks like the one next door will do nothing for you.
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Direction
We hand you our reading of the project: the structure we propose, the stages, what will need to be produced, and a first take on style through mood boards. The point is simple, making sure we are all looking the same way before anything gets created.
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Framing
Three genuinely different logo directions, which we then iterate on together. You watch the brand take shape and you decide while there is still room to change your mind.
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Production and delivery
The longest stage, paced by regular back and forth. At the end: the brand book as a PDF, every asset filed in a shared folder, source files on request, and a brand resource page of your own, a single address holding everything we have made together.