Vellum Room bottles the calm of a Lisbon apothecary

Botica Vela is a small apothecary in Lisbon’s Príncipe Real, selling herbal remedies, oils and candles made in a workshop behind the counter. Vellum Room was asked to bring the shop’s growing product range together without losing the feel of an old pharmacy.

The studio designed a modular apothecary label that sits on plain white cartons and bottles. Each label carries a number, a Latin plant name and a short use, and the colour of a thin border tells customers which family a product belongs to.

Colour from the tiles

That border palette comes from the faded azulejo tiles on the shop’s façade: a chalky blue, a sun-bleached yellow and a deep green. “We wanted the shelf to feel like the building,” says Vellum Room’s Inês Carvalho.