On the occasion of the Provincial Garden Show in Aigen-Schlägl in 2019, the Schlägl-Bier brewery, the only monastery brewery in Austria, built a new visitor centre with a shop, bar and tasting room. Interior design specialist destilat was brought on board by Arkade-Architekten, the commissioned architectural firm.
destilat developed a flexible presentation, exhibition and shop system with the aim of giving the topic of beer enjoyment a correspondingly high-quality ambience, which is already taken for granted in wine culture.
The atmosphere draws its sensual power strongly from the visual translation of the three main ingredients of beer: blue for water, brown for hops and green for barley/malt.
The large-scale backlit graphics are based on macro images of green and brown glass from beer bottles, while a blue mutation of the same subject serves to zone the exhibition, tasting and sales areas.
In the design and material, the regional significance and centuries-long anchoring of the monastery as a cultural and spiritual centre play just as important a role as the values of the monastery brewery with regard to the production and processing of regional raw materials.
The furniture is made exclusively of wood from the monastery's own sawmill, and the formal construction of the furniture refers directly to the stacks of wood in the sawmill.