There are places Up North that feel like they’ve always been there. And then there are places that don’t quite match anything around them, but somehow still feel exactly right in the sometimes quirky nooks and crannies of Wisconsin.
The Turk’s Inn was one of those.
It’s been gone for well over a decade now, which somehow makes it harder to explain. And the thing is, it didn’t match the Northwoods or what you would expect from the location it sat in.
But it didn’t feel wrong either.
It just felt different.
And somehow, that worked.
Out here in the middle of nowhere, you don’t expect that level of design. You expect comfort. Familiarity. Predictability. Visually, The Turk’s Inn was none of those.
Places like that don’t just serve food and drinks. They create an atmosphere you carry with you, even after they’re gone.
And for us, that’s the part that stuck. Not just the space, but the design of it. The signage. The matchbooks. The logo. All of it felt completely unlike anything else you’d see around here.
We didn’t have the language for it at the time. We just knew we liked it.
Looking back now, it makes a lot more sense. We’ve always been drawn to things that don’t quite match, but still feel like they belong. Things that someone cared enough about to make them intentional.
So when we started building this brand, it felt natural to come back to places like this. Places that aren’t here anymore in the literal sense, but still exist visually and creatively.
Not to recreate them exactly. But to pull from them. To reimagine them. To carry that same spirit, the uniqueness, the design, the feeling, forward in a different way.
Sometimes it’s not even the place itself you remember. It’s the details. The way the sign looked. The typography. The colors on a matchbook you didn’t think twice about at the time.
Those are the things that stick.
And those are the things we keep coming back to.
If you’d like to see some of our Turk’s Inn designs, you can find them here.
