The Challenge
When Condé Nast Traveler names your restaurant the sexiest in Charlotte and your menu is in the hands of a Top Chef, your website cannot be an afterthought. 5 Church Charlotte needed a digital experience that matched the precision and atmosphere of the physical space. Not a brochure. An environment. Generic hospitality templates were never a consideration.
This was the first project I took on with 5th Street Group, one of the fastest-growing restaurant groups in the United States. It had to begin with something that earned the next one.
The Process
I came in with creative freedom and a set of branding suggestions rather than a locked style guide, which meant every significant design decision was mine to make and mine to defend. I started with the brand’s own geometry. The drop shadow on the “5” in their logo became the conceptual foundation for offset 3D border content containers that give the layout its distinctive depth and tension. My approach was to find the design logic already living inside the brand and build outward from it rather than imposing something from outside.
Side navigation scales to full screen height, creating a spatial quality that feels more like moving through a room than scrolling a page. Logo animation was built in After Effects and exported as a Lottie file for crisp, lightweight web delivery. On the back end, I built a custom post-type system for menu and press management so the team could keep content current without touching code. All of it ran through Pears Media Group, the agency I founded.
The project left a strong enough impression that core design concepts from it carried directly into my own site, which is the most honest endorsement I can give a project.
The Outcome
5 Church Charlotte launched with a digital presence worthy of its Condé Nast standing. Web traffic increased after launch alongside a measurable lift in reservations. Press coverage followed, extending the brand’s reach beyond the dining room. The project began a sustained creative partnership with 5th Street Group that produced three additional restaurant sites over the following years.
Disciplines: Web Design and Development · Motion Design · Creative Direction · Custom CMS Architecture · UI/UX · Animation · Lottie