Blank Street

Planting across Blank Street's UK coffee shops, including Charlotte Street and Redchurch Street. They arrived in the UK with a brand built on good independent coffee on every corner, and wanted a plant company that could deliver quality the same way — quickly, consistently, at scale.

A scheme designed to be looked after by baristas

Store sizes vary a great deal across the estate, which makes a conventional maintenance contract poor value: you end up paying a horticulturist to visit a room with four plants in it.

So we designed around the constraint instead of arguing with it. Every plant specified is one that can be kept alive by someone whose actual job is making coffee — tolerant of irregular watering, tolerant of the light each site happens to have, and slow enough growing that nothing needs pruning to stay in shape.

That rules out most of what looks good in a photograph, and it is a genuinely harder brief than a maintained scheme. A plant that a professional visits fortnightly can be temperamental. A plant looked after between orders cannot.

The same idea in every size of room

The stores range from small units to full corner sites, so the scheme works as a kit rather than a design: the same plant vocabulary, scaled up or down to whatever the space allows, so a customer walking into two Blank Streets in the same week recognises them as the same brand without the planting being literally identical.

Replaced rather than nursed

The other half of making this work is being straightforward about what happens when a plant does fail. Rather than a maintenance visit, plants get replaced — which for an estate of this kind is both cheaper and more reliable than trying to rescue something in a shop that opens at six in the morning.

Credits

Client: Blank Street Coffee
Planting: Plant Drop

Plant consultant: Dom Butler