The brands we love tend to be places we like being, Garden’s Director of Strategy Sam Fraser Steele on Placemaking

By Sam Fraser Steele
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Ask someone about a brand they love and, more often than you might expect, they end up describing a place. It might be the café where the staff know their order, or the hotel lobby they would happily sit in for an afternoon, or the shop they wander into without the need of buying anything. The affection is real and it is rooted somewhere physical, somewhere they chose to spend time, and I think that tells us something about where brands are heading.

The word for this, borrowed from urban design, is placemaking.

Where the idea comes from

Placemaking grew out of the work of people like Jane Jacobs and William H. Whyte, who spent the 1960s and 70s watching how people really used streets, squares and parks. Their observation was simple and quietly radical for its time. A space becomes a place when people give it meaning, when they linger, return and begin to feel that it belongs to them. Whyte filmed New York plazas to understand why some were full at lunchtime while others stood empty, and the answers were wonderfully ordinary: somewhere to sit, a bit of sun, food nearby, other people to watch.

What I find interesting is how well that thinking transfers to brands. A plaza nobody wants to sit in has a lot in common with a brand nobody wants to spend time with. Both can be beautifully designed and generously funded, and both are missing the same ingredient, which is a reason for a person to stay.

Why it matters more now

For a long time a brand could grow by being seen, and much of our industry was organised around visibility. That still matters, of course, but attention has become easier to buy and harder to keep, and people have grown very good at filtering out anything that simply asks for it. So much of daily life has moved on to screens that the physical moments now carry more weight than they used to. When someone chooses to walk through your door, sit at your table or spend a night under your roof, they are giving you their time and their full attention, and no media plan can purchase those.

The question I keep coming back to with clients is where would your customers choose to spend time, and what would it take for that somewhere to be yours? The answer tends to live in the small things: how a space is found from the road, what the menu feels like in the hand, what the person behind the counter is wearing and whether they seem glad you came.

A roadside stop that became a treat

When Afriquia asked us to look at Oasis Cafe, its authentic restaurant brand on forecourts across Morocco, the business was well established but the brand and environment had become a little tired. Our benchmarking of Moroccan forecourts and casual dining pointed to something quite human. People wanted a dependable stop that also felt like a treat, which meant the brand needed warmth, calm and quality far more than it needed noise.

Everything followed from that feeling. We chose a green that carries the relief of an oasis in the desert, and drew a symbol with a quiet nod to the Bedouin tent in the original brand. The interiors balance comfort with clarity, the wayfinding can be read at speed, and the photography shows real food and shared tables. Oasis Cafe was the master brand, with Tafernout for family dining and Express for quicker visits, so the welcome stays consistent whether a family has two hours or ten minutes.  Today Oasis Cafe is a real symbol of modern Morrocco, mixing authenticity and contemporary style, a place that holds a place in the hearts of Moroccan people, which is a remarkable thing to be able to say about somewhere you stop for fuel.

A motel that feels like somewhere

Mollie's is a  motel and diner concept that set out to make an undervalued category feel premium while keeping it accessible. Before we designed anything, our team stayed at the first site as guests, because the only honest way to understand a place is to spend a night in it. What came out of that stay was an understanding of a brand built on contrasts, bold without being brash and playful while staying considered, with its subtle nod to Americana expressed through human stories and kept well clear of theme park styling.

The identity then had to live everywhere a guest might meet it, from the signage on the road to the interiors, the uniforms and the coffee packaging. When Mollie's opened in Manchester city centre in January 2026, at the old Granada Studios, the same brand flexed for a crowd moving between work, dinner, drinks and live music, with a more refined palette and a more sociable, evening feel. Matt Bell, the Managing Director, told us we had helped them understand who Mollie's really is, and I think that understanding came from treating the brand as somewhere people love to go.

When the product is the place

Prestigia, Morocco's leading premium developer, is perhaps the purest example, because what it sells is quite literally a place to live. Our work gave the business a single clear narrative, anchored in a framework we called LIFE, which stands for Leadership, Innovation, Flourishing and Excellence. We paired it with a naming and endorsement system that lets each development keep its own character while drawing on the strength of the Prestigia name.

I find it useful to remember that nobody buying a home starts with the keys. Their first experience of the place is a hoarding, a rendering of an interior, or the way a sales suite is signed and laid out, which means the brand is the place for months or years before the building exists. The identity had to carry refined luxury with warmth, at every scale from large signage down to a social post, so that the feeling of wanting to live there arrives long before the residents actually do.

What the three have in common

Looking across these projects, the common thread is that each one began with watching people, much as Whyte did with his camera. We slept in the motel, we benchmarked the forecourts, and through our Strategy and Insight work and K-Lab, our research practice, we tried to understand what people were hoping to feel before deciding what anything should look like. The design followed from that, and in each case it became a system generous enough to let every brand belong to its own setting while remaining recognisably itself.

This is what we mean at Garden when we talk about living brands. Places are never finished. They grow with the people who use them, and a brand that thinks of itself as a place inherits that same capacity to grow and, with luck, to be loved.

I wonder which places you find yourself returning to without quite knowing why, and what your own brand might borrow from them?

If you would like to talk about the places your brand could become, get in touch.