Parking garages are dark, dank and dirty. They’re not a place most people feel at home, that is, unless you’re at the parking garage beneath the Galt House Hotel & Suites in Louisville, where it gives guests a hearty, happy welcoming.
“It’s a difficult garage to navigate,” said Maggie Harlow, owner of Sign-A-Rama Downtown in Louisville. Her shop worked with Couch Creative and local signshops on the garage project. To help visitors get their bearings, the garage features distinctive murals in various locations. And this is the Bluegrass State, so the murals feature – what else? – horses and bluegrass.
“A lot of people are coming from out of town,” Harlow said. “The murals say ‘You’re in Kentucky; you’re in a unique place.’” (They also happened to go up just in time for the Kentucky Derby.)
The horses remind drivers to keep their doors locked and their valuables out of sight, and other messages, which are necessary but not always fun, and are easier to digest with a little humor.
The project also included several die-cut aluminum wayfinding signs, which came from a partnership with Eagle Sign and Design (Louisville).
The client specified the signs needed to be “vandal-resistant,” so the equine images were output on aluminum-composite panels using a MacDermid Colorspan 5465 printer (located at another Louisville Sign-A-Rama owned by Edd and Amy Johannemann). A 3M vinyl was applied over top to deter vandalism. “Any paint can be solvented off,” Harlow said.