Project Info.
BakeStand
Project Address:
Melbourne CBD, VIC 3000
Project Country:
Australia
Project Year:
2026
Project Type:
Commercial Project
Interior Designer:
Reve Design
Project Scope:
Lighting, signage, furniture & fittings, commercial display
How we worked with Reve Design to light, sign and fit out the home of the Melbourne-style cookie, three times over.
There is no better measure of a delivery partner than repeat work. Not long after we completed Le Yeahllow's Collins Arcade venue, built from an ambitious set of renders, the same team came back with their next venture and a bigger ask. The project was BakeStand, a new home for the Melbourne-style cookie, and the brief from Reve Design was three stores across the Melbourne CBD, each with its own concept, all opening within months of each other.
This was not one fit out repeated three times. Reve Design gave each address its own spatial idea: a fabric sky at Hyde Melbourne Place, a walk-in Wonderland on Melbourne Walk, a compact self-contained kiosk at Melbourne Central. Our scope shifted with each one, covering lighting throughout, custom decorative fixtures, illuminated signage, and at two of the sites, furniture, fittings and commercial display technology. What stayed constant was the standard: the finished store had to match the render.
Project Locations
Select a location to explore each store.
The first thing you notice in the Hyde Melbourne Place store is the ceiling. A continuous run of warm brown fabric folds across the entire soffit in deep, soft waves, like the layered interior of a cookie broken open. We supplied and installed that fabric ceiling, and it set up the most interesting technical problem of the whole project.
Reve Design did not want the ceiling and the lighting to sit side by side. The brief was for them to interweave, with track lighting nestled into the troughs between the fabric waves, sitting flush with the underside of the membrane so that fixtures appear and disappear as you move through the store. Light grazes in and out of the folds rather than beaming down from an open ceiling.
Fabric and luminaires are not natural companions, so the engineering had to be resolved before anything went up. We assessed the heat output of the track fixtures across long daily trading hours against the behaviour of the fabric, confirmed safe operating temperatures for a fitting that lives in permanent contact with a soft membrane, and were ready to specify alternative fixtures if the numbers had said otherwise. They did not need to. The installed system runs cool, the fabric keeps its shape, and the effect reads completely effortless, which is exactly what a resolved detail should do.
Drag the divider below: Reve Design's concept render on one side, the finished store on the other, the same view.
Below the ceiling, a flock of folded-paper bird lights is scattered through the store: perched on brass rails, threaded through suspended rings, resting on slender poles. They give the room a sense that something is quietly in motion overhead. On the walls, our illuminated signage carries the brand with a softer voice, with halo-lit lettering and the backlit BakeStand running-legs mark glowing gently off the paintwork rather than shouting over it.
Our scope here extended past lighting into the furniture. The tables stand on stacked, colourful totem legs, and their tops were produced to a very specific instruction from the designer: the surface had to carry the same stone texture as the service counter, so the tables read as pieces of the counter that wandered off into the room. Material continuity like that is the kind of intent that gets lost when a fit out is split across too many suppliers. Handling the counter joinery, the tables and the finishes together meant it survived intact.
The Melbourne Walk store is Reve Design at full tilt. The concept is Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, and the store commits to it completely, from a keyhole-shaped portal in a deep blue wall to a checkerboard floor and a counter clad in cloud-blue stone. Our job was to make the fantasy glow.
Above the keyhole portal, "We're All Mad Here" arcs in glowing letters fabricated and installed by our signage team, lighting the threshold between the arcade and the store.
The hero fixture is a custom linear pendant that we developed from zero. A red steel line loops over and under five opal glass spheres above the counter, a drawn squiggle turned into a real, wired, structurally sound light. There was no catalogue product behind it. Working from the designer's drawings, we resolved the form, the internal wiring, the glass, the suspension and the finish, and produced a one-off fixture that now effectively serves as the store's signature. It answers the wavy black and white tiles behind the counter and the round cookies below it, which is precisely why the designer drew it that way.
This site was also our most extensive signage package for BakeStand. Alice's legs, mid-tumble in a blue dress and striped stockings, are halo-lit against the yellow wall beside backlit lettering. Out on the red-brick laneway frontage, the register shifts to something more like old trade signage: a neon-outlined BakeStand oval, a "Follow the Rabbit" lightbox, and a projecting clock-faced sign in blue that nods to the White Rabbit's pocket watch. One store, two frontages, two entirely different signage voices, all fabricated and installed by our team so the story stays coherent from the arcade to the laneway.
Drag the divider below to watch the Melbourne Walk frontage move from concept render to opening day.
Melbourne Central asked a different question. The site is compact, closer to a pop-up in scale, and it sits in open mall space with no walls to work with. Everything the brand needed to say had to live in the kiosk itself. We delivered the entire fitting: the counter, the lighting, the signage and the display technology.
The counter is the architecture here. Its ribbed yellow form wraps the whole tenancy like rolled dough, with a glass display case set into the top and a red overhead loop carrying a linear light across the servery. Halo-lit "Pick Up" lettering floats on the counter face, and a freestanding lollipop sign, a red drum on a slim pole with the brand's blue legs kicking over the top, marks the kiosk from across the mall floor.
The piece we want to highlight is the pair of LCD screens built into the counter. These are not static lightboxes. They run on a content management system, so the BakeStand team can upload and schedule whatever they like, from new flavour launches to seasonal campaigns, without touching the hardware or calling anyone. The posters became a channel the brand operates itself. It is a small example of a capability we are building into more of our commercial projects: display technology planned and integrated at fit out stage, rather than bolted on afterwards.
Across three addresses, our scope for BakeStand covered supply lighting, fully custom decorative fixtures, halo, neon and lightbox signage, joinery, furniture, a fabric ceiling and programmable digital display. Very little of it came off a shelf. Almost all of it started as an image on a designer's screen.
That is the way we prefer to work. When Reve Design put forward a fabric sky, a squiggle of red steel and glass, or a kiosk shaped like piped dough, the conversation was never about trimming the idea back. It was about engineering, testing and fabricating until the built store matched the picture. Place the renders beside the finished photography and the distance between them is hard to find. For BakeStand's designers, that meant their vision reached the street intact, three times, on three very different sites.
Lucretia works with designers and architects as a delivery partner from the first briefing through to installation. If you have a design that needs a team willing to say yes to the ambition and work closely with you to make it real, we would welcome the conversation. Contact us now!
