The Royal Nut Company is a Brunswick institution. A beloved family business that’s been selling wholesale nuts to Brunswick locals for 30 years or more, offering a unique retail experience right at the source of production. In recent times we’ve watched the Royal Nut Company change to a sustainable business model reducing their plastic packaging, buying and sourcing homegrown local nuts instead of cheaper imported products. They’ve been working with local beekeepers for their honey and they’ve been producing their own nut butters in glass packaging.

At Breathe, we’ve been big fans of what they’ve been doing and when their warehouse was sold to make way for apartments we wanted to help them move into their new factory — a site that has been vacant for a number of years. Celebrating the site’s industrial history, the existing character of the warehouse was retained — exposed roof trusses, high-level steel windows, existing brickwork and concrete floors. The existing brick warehouse was painted gold, establishing the company’s presence within the industrial area. Combined with oversized super-graphic elements borrowed from former decades, the facade becomes iconic and memorable, resonating with the ‘royal’ character of the brand. Internally, a whitewashed material palette was adopted alongside the gold motif that appears throughout, placing emphasis on the Royal Nut brand and the products themselves.

We wanted to make it functional, we wanted to keep it honest and of course, we wanted to make it gold, very gold.

Photography by Tom Ross

We are proud to acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation, the Traditional Custodians of the land upon which Royal Nut stands. We recognise their continuing connection to land, waters and culture.