Johnnie Walker
Diageo via BRC Imagination Arts
Client
Location
Princes Street, Edinburgh
Date
2021
Commissioned by Diageo via BRC Imagination Arts, this project asked me to create a hand-painted narrative for the VIP room and staircase of the Johnnie Walker Edinburgh flagship, one of the most ambitious whisky visitor experiences in the world. It is, in a real sense, the project that drew together everything I had been working towards.
The Brief
The brief for Johnnie Walker was to depict the four corners of Scotland where the brand's distilleries are located. Four distinct landscapes, four distinct characters, each rooted in the tasting notes of the whisky made there, and all woven together into a single continuous composition. I have never had so many references to tie together, or such a strong story to depict. It is the first commission that required me to wear glasses, because I was working at such a small and intricate scale.
The Four Corners
At Caol Ila, on the Isle of Islay, the landscape is entirely maritime: seaweed, sand, driftwood, and the spices found in the whisky itself. Ginger, turmeric, cardamom. And Sushi the cat, who lives at the distillery and appears somewhere in the scene for those who look closely enough.
From Caol Ila you can follow the path up through the landscape and jump on a puffer boat to cross over to Clynelish on the north-eastern coast of Scotland, where exotic flowers and pineapples grow. These are the tasting notes you find in that whisky: richer, more tropical, a different world from the maritime west.
Further into the mainland we reach Cardhu in Speyside, a secretive and quiet part of the country. Orchards and grassland, and hidden among them the little farmstead where Helen Cumming ran her illicit still in the early nineteenth century, keeping whisky production alive while her husband greeted the excisemen at the front door. She is in the landscape if you know where to look.
Finally, Glenkinchie in East Lothian: airy and calm, full of wildflower meadows and heather. It is framed with a blossom tree, because there is a blossom tree at that distillery. And if you look closely enough, you will find Bruce, the distillery dog.
The Challenge and the Craft
Working entirely in my studio, I built the composition in paint, developing the full mural by hand before the artwork was digitised and translated into production-ready wallpaper files. This is the core of the paint to pixel to print process. The hand-painted original exists as a physical artefact. The digitised version carries every brushstroke, every layer of texture, every trace of the hand into the final installation. At scale, on a wall, that trace is precisely what makes the difference between decoration and atmosphere.
The Space
Because the installation occupies a restricted-access VIP space, it has the quality of a hidden gem: encountered only by those who reach the innermost part of the experience. There is something I find fitting about that. The staircase installation carries visitors into that private world, the mural unfolding across the walls as they ascend, building anticipation for what lies beyond.
The Johnnie Walker Princes Street experience received the SEGD Merit Award in 2023, one of the most respected honours in the field of experiential and environmental design.
If you are developing a flagship, a visitor experience, or a VIP environment that demands visual work at the highest level of specificity and craft, I’d love to work with you.
“The hand-painted original carries every trace of the brush into the final wallpaper. In the VIP room, Scotland’s ‘four corners’ unfold as a hidden gem, where the landscape is rooted in the very tasting notes of the whisky ~ a story told from the inside out.”