The Guinness brewery at St James’s Gate, Dublin, has always been a visitor attraction, long before the company even considered making it so.
A hundred years ago, people used to bang on the door and demand to have a look around. For Guinness, the problem has never been how to encourage visitors to the site, but instead how best to present the history, tradition and passion of Ireland’s best-loved export.
In the 1980s, Guinness created the Hopstore as a dedicated visitor attraction within the grounds of the brewery. Ralph Ardill, former Director of Marketing and Strategic Planning at Imagination describes it as ‘a very traditional, didactic “history of Guinness” attraction.’ And a successful one: by the mid 1990s it was struggling to cope with 470,000 visitors a year, having been designed to cater for less than half that number.
With many years experience working on other successful branded visitor attractions, such as Cadbury World, Imagination was an obvious choice of agency for the redesign.
It was by no means a clear-cut project. Philip Osbourne, Managing Director at Guinness during the development of Storehouse, admits that at the outset Guinness ‘actually didn’t know what we wanted. We knew what the business need was quite clearly, we knew what the financials were, but we didn’t know, in design terms, what we wanted or how it might work.’
Once Imagination began researching the project, it soon became clear that there were wider issues at stake than simply redesigning the existing Hopstore attraction.
During the initial fact-finding process, Imagination and RKD – the architects working on the project – began to uncover a broader range of business needs than just a straightforward redesign. ‘We kept hearing about issues that the brand had other than its visitor centre,’ says Ardill. ‘Immersed in the Guinness environment we picked up on the radar all these other strategic issues.’
- There weren’t any learning facilities at the brewery, so staff had to go off site for training
- The Guinness archive was a fantastic resource that nobody knew about
- While the Guinness brand carried important connotations of tradition and heritage among older consumers, it wasn’t engaging younger drinkers – and Ireland has one of the youngest demographics in the EU
- Guinness has a strong history of benevolence and creating social spaces such as schools and hospitals
With these strategic issues bubbling under the surface, Ardill and Imagination Creative Director Adrian Caddy happened to notice a disused building in the brewery premises. It turned out to be an old warehouse built in 1904 for storing hops. This discovery gave Ardill and Caddy an idea, and a new direction for the project, and on the way back to London they began sketching out a building with a pint glass-shaped seven-storey atrium at its centre.
