FAENA Studio’s Carmel identity honours a vanished Barcelona bar

Bar Los Noveles sat across the street from Guillem’s childhood home in Barcelona’s Carmel neighbourhood. It hosted goldfinch singing competitions – jilguero contests where birds would trill and warble while regulars nursed their drinks. The bar no longer exists, lost to the gentrification reshaping the hillside district. But when Guillem opened his own establishment thousands of kilometres away in Mexico City’s Roma Norte, he carried that memory with him. FAENA Studio, the local design practice led by Creative Director Ferran Ollé, was hired to give it visual form. Carmel brings Spanish neighbourhood bar culture to a Mexican audience – not the Spain of flamenco posters and bullfighting imagery, but the Spain of weekend football matches blaring from corner televisions, hand-painted menus and layered walls where posters accumulate over decades. The identity FAENA developed aims to capture this atmosphere through restraint rather than reproduction. “We looked at façades, old tiles, hand-painted signs, posters, menus and all the visual noise you find in local bars,” explains Ollé. “The idea wasn’t to recreate them literally, but to translate that atmosphere and way of living into the space.” The goldfinch appears throughout the identity as a small act of remembrance. Rendered in warm yellow against the predominantly black and white palette, the bird connects directly to Guillem’s childhood memories of Bar Los Noveles. The yellow itself derives from the jilguero’s plumage, providing the accent colour that breaks the monochromatic base and creates visual rhythm across applications.