Why Matey chose restraint over nostalgia for this historic bar identity

Sometimes the best ideas arrive when you’re not trying so hard to find them. For Josh Carnley of Matey, that moment came on a curve of Interstate 65 in Birmingham, Alabama, where the perfect solution to a stubborn branding challenge suddenly clicked into place. Bygones, a cocktail destination in Birmingham’s Southside neighbourhood, had given Matey a brief that seemed straightforward enough: create an identity that feels warm, elevated and timeless, with “a sense of long-standing existence without feeling like a bygone era.” The bar, housed in an 1890 building that once served as a farrier’s workshop, was the dream project of owners Michael Toviyahu-McKenzie and Phillip Crowe, local cocktail heroes who’d spent five years meticulously building their vision. That five-year journey wasn’t just about finding the right space – it was about crafting every detail of what would become Birmingham’s answer to the classic cocktail experience. The historic building, with its original horseshoe-shaped bar layout that nodded to its farrier past, presented both opportunity and challenge. How do you honour that history without getting trapped by it? The challenge? Every concept that emerged kept circling back to the past – vintage horses, period characters, old-world nostalgia. Matey found themselves sketching smiths shoeing horses, fancy characters serving dirty martinis, anything that felt connected to the building’s heritage. None of it felt right for a bar that wanted to embrace the present while honouring its heritage. “We had wrestled with concepts for some time and nothing seemed to really shine through,” Carnley explains. “We knew that the team didn’t want Bygones to feel ‘old’ or mean ‘from a bygone era’ but those were the ideas that kept finding their way to the sketchbook. Is it an old horse because the space was originally where smiths would put shoes on horses? Is it a fancy character serving a dirty martini? We didn't have much to show after the first few weeks of the branding phase.”