Jake Ewen Professional Design Services - The Chameleon Tree

The Chameleon Tree Restaurant & Coffee house

A new name and a major renovation of Longleat's flagship restaurant.

This reimagining of the restaurant was part of a greater shift across the park, shedding the 90’s ‘Disney theme park’ skin of it’s predecessor, moving toward a more sophisticated design, in line with Longleat’s new brand proposition of ‘Astonishing Kingdom’ an authentically, eccentrically English destination.

Inspired by this, and the new, mischievously ambiguous name for the restaurant, I started thinking about the qualities of both trees and chameleons; their various characteristics, adaptations and forms.

For example, the chameleon’s ability to change colour is striking, and their rapidly extrudable tongues and Independently mobile eyes, their prehensile, spiralled tails

What would a chameleon tree look like?
I looked for shared forms; trees within the form of chameleons and chameleons within trees.

All this suggested to me a character full of riddles. At the heart of the restaurant a CNC cut plywood tree was constructed around one of the central pillars, appearing to branch out into the vaults of the ceiling. As with this hidden tree, I started looking at ways in which a chameleon might hide itself in the very fabric of the space, with optical illusions as a theme for future artwork in the space.

I started exploring ways in which a chameleon might appear also to be a tree. This meditation lead me to discover the final form of the logo.

At first sight, one form, the tree or the chameleon will dominate. The discovery of the secondary form can take a second or two for the brain to perceive, educing a small 'aha!' moment when it does. A good day at Longleat is filled with many of these small yet ‘astonishing’ moments.