Client: 5 Church Charlotte — flagship restaurant of 5th Street Group, named “Charlotte’s sexiest restaurant” by Condé Nast Traveler, with a menu by Top Chef Jamie Lynch.
Role: Creative Director / Web Designer & Developer (via Pear’s Studio)
Disciplines: Web Design & Development, Motion Design, Custom CMS Architecture, UI/UX, Animation (Lottie / After Effects)
The Problem
When Condé Nast Traveler calls your restaurant the sexiest in Charlotte, your website can’t be an afterthought. 5 Church Charlotte needed a digital experience that matched the precision and atmosphere of the physical space — a site that felt as considered as Jamie Lynch’s menu and as visually confident as the restaurant’s reputation. Generic hospitality templates weren’t going to cut it.
The Process
Every design decision 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. I built a side navigation system that scales to full screen height, creating a spatial quality that feels more like moving through a room than scrolling a page. The logo was animated 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 fresh without touching code. The work left enough of an impression that I reused core design concepts on my own site — which is the most honest endorsement I can give a project.
The Results
The finished site was a genuine digital extension of one of Charlotte’s most recognized dining experiences — not a brochure, but an environment. It gave 5 Church Charlotte a web presence worthy of its Condé Nast standing, and the custom CMS architecture gave the client the editorial control a busy restaurant team actually needs. The project became a creative benchmark that continued to influence my own design practice.
This was a project that was managed through my agency, Pear’s Studio. The website consists of many custom features that were created by yours truly. The site has an offset 3D border to the content containers that was inspired by the drop-shadow of the 5 in their logo. There is a menu on the side that adjusts itself to the full high of the screen and guides you through the home and menu page, smooth scrolling you to the different sections of each page. The logo on the home page was animated in After Effects and exported as a Lottie file, an animated vector graphic. On the backend, a menu and press management system was created by using custom post-types and fields. The home, press, and about pages use offset overlapping content containers that move and overlay each other as you scroll, adding another layer of dimension to the site. This website, of course, is fully mobile-friendly and has conditionals for most screen sizes, so the end-user has a good experience when going through the site.
I really enjoyed the design and development of this site. I enjoyed it so much that I used some of the aspects of it in the website you are currently on now. I think you will like this site as much as the delicious food they serve, that’s if you are ever are in Charlotte that is. In the words of Levar Burton, “You don’t have to take my word for it”. Go to the site, go to their restaurant, experience it for yourself.