Yeronin Coffee Shop is located in the historic archway on Millionnaya Street, just two minutes from the Hermitage Museum. They serve sandwiches and croissants, offer specialty coffee to go, and the physical space is woven from historical stamped brick and marble.
A young girl—a native of St. Petersburg for six generations—peeks into the keyhole of a family casket and sees anthropomorphic lions, a telephonist goat, water griffins guarding a lock amidst Baltic waves, and a rider on a rhinoceros in Petersburg. Once she fixates on one, it pulls another along. It will slip through time with a paw or a finger, glide like a swan in a cup of espresso, nod with a horn from a paper bag, hook onto a doorknob with its beak, justify itself with a quote from a homeowner’s registry on a loaf of bread box, and the brass eye will wink slyly from a church pew standing in the corner.
The metaphor is based on the idea of touch and the convergence of different characters, archival records, and mythical beings. The prototypes for the characters are the girl’s ancestors, whose history we learned from household ledgers. The mythical characters are their pets. For instance, a great-great-grandfather who worked at Siemens & Halske had a goat with a telephone tail. Eroin’s world is the scattered parts of family history across St. Petersburg.
Gold / Design / Communication Design / Illustration