Never underestimate the power of childlike curiosity. It’s the stuff that the best adult brains are made of. Take Monica Berg and Alex Kratena for instance. While most of us tend to lose that inquisitiveness, the fearlessness of asking endless questions then challenging the answers; the pushing of boundaries to see what you can get away with and then, pushing them a little bit more – Monica and Alex have held on to those traits, and Tayer Studios is where they do it to best effect.
Tayer Studios – where curious minds reimagine the future of the RTD universe
They describe Tayer Studios as the pioneering extension of their brand – a platform for co-creation. Which is true. But going back to that childlike analogy, we liken it to a playground. More specially an adventure playground where they team up and have fun with fellow creatives. However, here’s the important bit, rather than forging an alliance with those with exactly the same outlook and specialisms, they gravitate to people from different creative fields, exploring different thought processes, then percolating ideas and allowing the magic to happen. The approach will always be different but the end result is guaranteed to be the same: a collection of three new, clever and more importantly, delicious ready-to-drink cocktails.
“The beauty of Tayer Studios is we allow ourselves to go into it with a blank page and open mind,” Monica tells us. “The outcome is determined on the relations, conversations and collaborators.” Last year, for the inaugural Tayer Studios, they teamed up with self-taught perfumer Maya Nijie, award-winning designer Martin Kastner and celebrated calligrapher Oscuro. Each fellow creative was given the same set of raw materials to interpret as they wished. This year it’s gone in a completely different direction, introducing scent, fragrance and flavour to the digital world with partners Ana Nicolaescu and Sebastian Tiew from Cream Projects.
Fragrance at the fore
“They’re probably the most abstract cocktails that we’ve done to date,” Monica continues. She’s referring to Accord Chypre, Accord Suede and Accord Tabac, the three new Tayer Studio RTDs which were unleashed into the world last week.
Key to collection is that word ‘accord’ – in the fragrance world, these are the building blocks of a scent, akin to the ingredients in a cocktail. For this project the team drew inspiration from three very distinct, very notable accords and translated the scent into exquisite drinks, ready for you to contemplate and enjoy at home.
And while we’re on the subject of homes, that’s another integral element to this year’s partnership. It’s where Ana and Seb reimagine the accords as three distinct spaces – each conjuring up the look, feel and taste of the new drinks. Confused? Just take a look at the video below…
Tayer Studios + Cream Projects
Which one is speaking most directly to you right now? Which one intrigues you enough to want to try? This is how Tayer Studios + Cream Projects want you to engage with the products, by emotion rather than your usual taste preferences.
We chatted to Monica and Ana to find out more…
In a nutshell, what is this year’s Tayer Studios collab all about?
MB: Essentially, we’ve created three RTD cocktails inspired by the perfume accords Chypre, Suede and Tobacco. These were the starting point for Cream Projects to design an imaginary world in the form of digital artworks. They captured the mood of each expression in unique visual identities which took shape as avant-garde residences.
What came first, the idea or the partnership?
MB: The partnership. Ana and Seb have been coming to the bar for many years and over time, we started to have discussions about their work and how they do it. We were fascinated and said that we should have a proper sit down and talk about maybe doing something together. It was very natural, very exciting – it was unusual for them to work in our field and vice-versa.
AN: We’ve always loved what they do at Tayer and thought it would be cool to work together but didn’t think they would be interested – even if they were, we didn’t know what we could do. One night we were talking about what we were working on and the whole project progressed from there.
What is Cream Projects and how does what you do tie in with Tayer Studios?
AN: Both Seb and I have a background in architecture and see Cream Projects as a CGI practice. We direct CGI content across a variety of industries like fashion and music and also do a lot of our own research which takes shape as artworks and installations.
We’re also very much interested in the idea of the hyper-real – extending certain bits of reality into the digital space, making things that feel familiar but just a bit different. The Tayer Studios project fits our way of thinking perfectly.
When did the idea for basing the RTDs around fragrance accords come into play?
MB: From our side there were multiple things that happened. Firstly, transforming perfume accords into cocktail equivalents has been something that we’ve been working on for some time without having the vocabulary to necessarily know that was what we were doing – this project has made that much clearer to us. Once we honed in on the idea of focusing on accords, we then had to work on the drinks by taking away all of the traditional limitations around the cocktails and focusing on visualising the accords themselves.
Did you have several accords in mind before narrowing the selection down to the final three?
MB: The three we ended up with weren’t predetermined but became very clear early on as these are accords and flavours that we are naturally inclined to use – we use them a lot in the bar as well.
Can you describe them?
MB: Chypre accords are woody, earthy and vibrant and almost always built around a base of oakmoss, patchouli and labdanum with a citrusy top note of bergamot. Suede accords are warm, smoky and distinguished, they’re elegant – almost animalistic. We reimagined this to evoke the powerful scent of leather goods.
When you think of Tobacco accords, it’s easy to just think of smoke but they can be fruity, rich and they change all the time. Tobacco accords are deep and lingering, smooth and warm – like the home Ana and Seb created.
How did you approach bringing these accords to life, both in cocktails and in the homes?
MB: There was lots of research. Chypre is an accord that was created by François Coty, founder of Coty fragrance house in Paris. He created Chypre de Coty in 1917 taking inspiration from the island of Cyprus. So recreating that was very abstract because Cyprus is a place and the accord is Coty’s interpretation of that place but Chypre has gone on to become one of the most adored and used accords in perfumery. Tabac and Suede are different because they are much more our interpretations of each of the individual components.
That’s why we’ve chosen not to list the ingredients that we’ve used in the cocktails, we don’t want them to be the main driver behind why people choose the drinks. This is more about capturing the abstract flavours and people being drawn to the accord or mood that speaks to them.
AN: We had a tasting with Alex and Monica where they explained what the thought process behind each of the accords was. We then went away and reimagined what those flavours would look like within our world.
We came up with the idea of the ingredients interacting as a visual way to present each drink but one of the conversations we had was about creating a Tayer hotel/resort which led us on to the Barbie movie and a particular scene where you see all the Barbies’ homes. We thought, what if these drinks were personified? What would each universe look like?
I’d like to add that the houses are not necessarily functional, which was very interesting for us with our background in architecture. We wanted to go between what’s real and something like Pixar where you don’t design for the design, you design for the image, so these spaces are imagined with the idea of creating these atmospheric images in mind. There’s a lot of repetition, lots of patterns and a lot of interesting openings and corridors which create really interesting compositions.
And how did those flavours translate into the digital space?
AN: That’s a really interesting question because obviously with us working in the digital space, the screen doesn’t taste like anything or smell like anything, so on a very simple level the very first thing we had to do was assign an overall visual language in terms of a colour palette.
Cyphre is green and vibrant but also quite layered so this house would have to have a green, fresh taste. Suede was much deeper and more intense so it brought to mind concrete, greys and dark browns.
Tabac is sensual and mysterious, and conjured up earthy, woody tones. We approached the project by starting with the colour and material, then moved on to finding architectural references for each space.
Who did you envisage drinking each of the cocktails?
AN: We always say that we design moods rather than content. For example, with Accord Suede, when we initially designed the home we were imagining that the person who would be living in this home would be a very solitary person. It’s a drink that you drink alone. You’re probably quite a serious, maybe a man, someone who takes their meetings from home.
With Accord Chypre, there’s a huge table for a lot of people to gather round, so this is definitely the party home, people come here all the time and friends hang out, have good times. That’s why we also designed a machine that brings the Accord Chypre bottles to the kitchen. With Accord Tabac, for me it’s giving sensual vibes – something you drink with your partner or someone you want to impress,
MB: It’s been really fascinating because some of our customers told us that they wouldn’t usually go for a particular drink based on the explanation given but when they saw the videos they were drawn to a particular space so they wanted to try the drink that it represented.
Which was the hardest to finesse?
AN: They all got a bit tricky at some point but with Accord Suede, it felt immediately clear what we would do. We wanted a very brutalist, dark, concrete, masculine space.
MB: I wouldn’t say one was easiest or hardest, they each had different processes. Also, it’s not one person making these drinks – we all pull in different directions and contributed different things to each of the drinks. For example, I know that my strengths are more towards chypre, the lighter, delicate side of things, whereas Alex always has a tendency to make really good drinks around tobacco. As a team, we play to our individual strengths.
What did you learn from this particular collaboration?
AN: We were fascinated by just how deeply Alex and Monica think about flavours. The way they were describing what an accord is and how all these flavours come together really blew our minds. It was also great getting to know more about their way of working and the industry they work in – it’s really opened our eyes to the creative process behind cocktails. As people with backgrounds in architecture we tend to have a particular appreciation for chefs as there is a parallel in the way they construct the plate and how they think about flavours. But we now have that same fascination with drinks – particularly what Monica and Alex do. On a design level, the project pushed us a lot too.
MB: We learned so much, which is what Tayer Studios is all about. It was fascinating to see how Ana and Seb’s backgrounds in architecture come into play – they’re very much about detail and structure so it was really interesting to see how they placed small signals from our universe, like the ‘e’ from Tayer and the ’s’ from Studios, and brought them into the universe of the drinks. Because, ultimately they are connected. I think you can watch the videos 100 times and see different things.
We love how they’ve created these spaces because ultimately, the drinks start in the bar but leave the bar and become part of the rest world. This is one way to start a creative that can grow into the future.
Speaking of the future, can we expect more interpretations of perfume accords from Tayer Studios going forward?
MB: We’ll definitely be doing something new for the next Tayer Studios but will be incorporating a lot more of these cocktail accords in our drinks in the bar.
