Biabum designs Salva Bar as a chef’s home away from home in Rio

Salva Bar is the restaurant chef Fabricio Chagas built to put his own Bahia in Rio de Janeiro – a personal, lived version of the northeastern Brazilian state – drawn from memory, family and the places that shaped him. For its identity, Chagas turned to local design studio Biabum, with a brief to capture that affection and everyday feeling without tipping into caricature. Biabum organised the system around three things pulled from Bahia itself – the sea, with its lightness, sun and air; the sertão, standing for strength, family, land and affection; and the mangrove, a space of rhythm, gathering and greenery. Rather than sit only as colour palettes, they flow through the whole identity, each with its own library of illustrations and graphic references, and each carried into the building, where the ground floor takes the sea, the sertão shapes the family floor above, and the mangrove sets the top floor aside for music. “During the research phase, there were two visual references that came up repeatedly, but we consciously chose not to lean on them too heavily because they are already so strongly associated with representing Bahia and Brazil,” Creative Director Beatriz Tati Nóbrega explains. The studio took texture from xilogravura (woodcut printmaking); from the Fita do Bonfim, a ribbon and cultural symbol in Bahia, it took vibrant, luminous colours. “The logotype was inspired by the hand-painted titles on a beautiful special edition of Jorge Amado’s books,” Nóbrega tells us of the writer whose special-edition covers carry hand-painted lettering on red. In Brazil, she notes, vernacular lettering “is almost part of our intangible cultural heritage,” so the work sat in preserving its warmth while refining it into a consistent, functional logotype. “We carefully adjusted proportions, spacing and rhythm so the final mark would feel human, while still performing across every application.”