The Schlägl brewery, Austria’s oldest monastery brewery, built a new visitor center, which includes a shop, bar, and tasting room on the occasion of the 2019 horticultural show in Aigen-Schlägl. Arkade-Architekten were commissioned to realise this project, and hired the specialists of destilat for the project’s interior design.

destilat developed a flexible presentation, exhibition, and shop system that provides high-class ambience for sophisticated beer culture, comparable to settings that had already been established around wine culture for many years.

The ambience’s sensuous power stems from the visual translation of beer’s three main ingredients: blue for water, brown for hops, and green for barley/malt.

The large-scale, backlit graphic elements are based on macro photographs of the green and brown glass of beer bottles, while blue mutations of this theme serve as zoning for the exhibition, tasting, and shop areas.

The monastery‘s regional significance and centuries-old anchoring as a cultural and spiritual center were just as important as the monastery’s values regarding the production and processing of regional ingredients.

Therefore, only wood from the monastery’s own sawmill was used for the furnishing, whereby the formal design structure of the furniture refers directly to the sawmill’s stacks of wood