Studio X designed Rare Butchery in Hong Kong - a 180 sqft dry-aged meat store, brand built from scratch.

Rare Butchery's black fascia with oversized No.1 and RARE lettering and gooseneck lamps, Mosque Street

Rare Butchery is the first retail venture for Rare, a Hong Kong importer and distributor of high quality Australian meat - and the project where Studio X built a brand from nothing.

Process

Concept Design

Schematic Design

Detail Design

Tender Documentation

Tender Management

Construction Support

Post-Completion Review

We took a tiny, rather sad-looking retail unit on Mosque Street and turned it into a premium butchery and dry-aged meat specialist. The physical work was bespoke fixturing, custom artwork and a dry-ager cabinet embedded in the shop window so that passers-by could see the product up close.

But the scope demanded more than the built environment. It called for our ability to build brands from scratch: naming the business, positioning it, and creating a dynamic and market-appropriate identity, along with all the collateral that identity needed - signage, packaging and staff uniforms.

At 180 sqft there is nowhere to hide. Every decision is visible, and everything has to earn its place.

Rare Butchery interior with the bull mural, glass-fronted fridge and dry-aged meat display counter

The main counter with a hand-etched bull graphic, white tiled backdrop and warm timber joinery create a simple but distinctive focal point.

A butcher works at the counter beneath the hand-drawn bull mural at Rare Butchery, Hong Kong

The open preparation area places the craft of butchery on display, framed by the oversized bull graphic and packaging with the shop’s bold RARE identity.

A stripped-back shopfront pairs oversized RARE branding with blackened metal, warm timber framing and industrial lighting for a direct, street-facing identity.

Naming, positioning, identity, packaging, uniforms and the store itself. A whole business, designed at 180 square feet.

Potted herbs on black steel shelves above a row of Rare branded paper bags

Rare Butchery shopfront and façade, retail design by Studio X

Selected views

Views of the completed butchery alongside the brand identity, packaging and uniforms developed for Rare.

Rare Butchery interior with chilled display counter, herb shelves and black and white marble chequerboard floor

A marbled cut of beef resting on Rare-branded butcher paper

Close-up of the hand-drawn bull mural on white brick tile, with brass tap and branded paper bag

Rare Butchery's branded paper bag, printed with its No.1 Mosque Street address, held over the meat counter

(Approach)A dry-ager set into the shop window, so the product does the selling before anyone reaches the door.

Drawings & details

This section presents selected drawings and technical studies developed to test layout, circulation, and spatial logic prior to detailed documentation.

Floor plan of the 180 sqft Rare Butchery unit on Mosque Street, showing counter and display layout

Compact floor plan for RARE, organising the shopfront dry-ager display, preparation, storage and customer circulation within a constrained corner unit.

Reflected ceiling plan for Rare Butchery, setting out pendant positions and dimensions

Shopfront elevation developing RARE’s bold graphic identity, oversized signage and industrial lighting across the compact street frontage.

Brand development work for RARE, extending the identity across butcher’s tags, cooking guidance, packaging and shopfront graphics.

Before & after

Use the slider to see the transformation from a neglected Mosque Street unit to the completed butchery.

The Mosque Street unit before work began, boarded up behind its original tiled shopfront

Drag

A distributor's first step into retail - and a brand that had to exist before the store could be designed.

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Great Harvest had built a business importing and distributing high quality Australian meat, but had never sold direct. That made this more than a fit-out. Before there was a store there had to be a brand - a name, a position in the market, an identity and a full set of collateral - and all of it had to work at the scale of a single small unit on Mosque Street.

Studio X's scope ran from concept design through schematic and detail design, tender documentation, tender management and on-site management. We provided a comprehensive construction supervision service, attending site regularly to monitor progress and report back.

The result is a premium butchery in a footprint most designers would consider too small to bother with, which is precisely why it works.

Annie Chan

Owner & Director
Great Harvest Co Ltd

It has been an absolute pleasure working with Studio X. The team is very talented, the unit size was very small and yet they have been able to incorporate everything that we wanted into the limited space.

We had a tight schedule, and they have been extremely efficient in delivering a solid design solution within a short period of time and provided us with a lot of holistic professional advice along the way.

We are highly impressed by their pursuit of perfection and their aptitude for creative problem-solving. We will not hesitate to recommend Studio X to any business.