There is something slightly strange about a beautiful advent calendar box. For a few weeks, it becomes part of the house. It sits in the room like a little theatre, opened each morning, admired each evening, quietly gathering the ritual of December around it. Then Christmas passes, the year turns over, and suddenly even the most carefully made festive packaging can feel as though its time has ended. That thought stayed with me while I was creating my Liberty London Beauty Advent Calendar concept, because it felt like such a waste for something so considered to belong only to Christmas, then be put away or thrown away once the decorations come down.
I wanted to design something that could carry the feeling of Christmas without being trapped inside it. Not a box shouting in red and green, not a seasonal spectacle that loses its charm by Boxing Day, but something more atmospheric and enduring. A piece that could move from the final hours of Christmas Eve into the first strange, hopeful days of a brand new year. I kept thinking about old wood, winter stars, hidden symbols, shop windows glowing after dark and the peculiar feeling of stepping inside Liberty, where the outside world seems to fall away and another one begins.
The concept became The Night Before Christmas: a mixed media advent calendar box design imagining Liberty after dark, in the final hours before the doors open and Christmas begins. The building is not presented as a still shopfront, but as a living house. Staff are hanging garlands, carrying gifts, dressing windows and tending to the last small details. I wanted to honour that enormous, often invisible labour behind beautiful retail moments, especially at Christmas, without turning the people into portraits or making the piece about any single individual. They are anonymous figures of care, craft and preparation, the hands behind the magic.
The building as a living archive
The design is rooted in Liberty's own history and architecture. I have always loved the way the building feels layered, almost theatrical, as if several different centuries are having a quiet conversation inside it. Its 1920s Tudor Revival character gave the artwork its structure: black timber, pale stone, carved details, heraldry, old interiors, steep roofs and a sense of ceremony. I began by physically building the front of the Liberty building from tiny pieces of painted card, recreating the dark timberwork by hand before digitally refining the composition. Even when the final artwork became more polished, I wanted that original material process to remain present. It mattered that the building was constructed, not simply drawn.
That same idea shaped the whole artwork. I did not want to decorate Liberty from the outside, as though Christmas had simply been placed on top of it. I wanted the building to offer up its own clues. The more I looked, the more I found. George and the Dragon appear on the front panel, drawn from the Liberty clock. The inscription beneath the clock, "No minute gone comes back again, take heed and see, ye nothing do in vain," winds around one of the side panels like a ribbon of time. It felt too beautiful, and too poignant, not to use. A reminder that craft is not wasted, that care matters, and that even the smallest details can hold weight.
The six heraldic crests above the Great Marlborough Street entrance also became part of the design. They belong to the six wives of Henry VIII, and I redrew them as tiny fragments of Tudor storytelling beneath the doorway. They are the kind of detail many people pass beneath without noticing, which is exactly why I wanted to include them. Liberty is full of those quiet historical gestures: carved animals, foliage, berries, birds, panels, crests and symbols that turn the building into a kind of visual archive. My job, as I saw it, was not to invent a new language for the store, but to listen to the one already there and allow it to speak through the artwork. Animals move throughout the calendar box like nocturnal guides. The owl on one side panel was inspired by a carved Liberty owl, reimagined here as a guardian of the store after dark. A frog sits among berries and flowers, dressed almost ceremonially, while a bird carries the clock across the night sky. On the roof, a pigeon holds a small memorial symbol, a reference to the tribute to Liberty staff who died during the war on a plaque inside the store and also to the pigeon's own quiet wartime service. I liked the idea of an ordinary city bird becoming something tender and ceremonial, carrying memory across the roofline.
The golden ship on the back panel nods to Liberty's naval timber history and to the sense that the building itself has lived more than one life. I imagined the back of the calendar not as a literal rear elevation, but as the inside of the house: the hidden theatre behind the shopfront. Staff figures hang from ribbons, garlands sweep across the atrium, dancers move below and the ship hovers like an ornament, relic and dream all at once. The back became a place where history, architecture and imagination could meet without becoming a museum display.
A Christmas box that can live beyond Christmas
There are also softer references woven through the windows. A dancing couple was reimagined from a 1920s Liberty scarf advertisement, bringing a little movement and glamour into the building. Baubles, bows, stars and garlands appear throughout, but they are deliberately balanced with architectural and botanical details so the design does not become purely festive. I wanted the Christmas elements to feel as though Liberty itself had grown them, rather than having them applied from outside.
The side panels were designed as portals. That may sound dramatic, but it is exactly how entering Liberty can feel. You step away from the noise of central London, cross the threshold, and suddenly the rhythm changes. Your shoes meet the wooden floors, the light shifts, the scent of the store gathers around you and the building seems to transport you somewhere else. The countryside on the side panels is not a rejection of London, but an expression of that threshold moment: the city falling softly behind you as the store opens into something wooded, dreamlike and full of pattern.
This was also my way of approaching the brief through longevity. A beauty advent calendar is naturally tied to December, but a truly beautiful box can become part of someone's home for much longer than that. I wanted this concept to have enough Christmas spirit to feel magical in the season, but enough depth, colour and narrative to survive afterwards. It could be kept for papers, ribbons, keepsakes, jewellery, letters, old receipts, tiny treasures, the sort of things that gather in drawers and somehow become personal history.
Mixed media, memory and brand storytelling
From a design perspective, this project sits somewhere between packaging design, illustration and creative direction. The process involved drawing, painting, collage, handmade texture and digital composition, but the real work was storytelling. Every panel needed to function on its own, while still wrapping around the box as one continuous world. Every reference needed a reason to be there. Every decorative element had to earn its place.
That is what I love most about heritage design when it is done with feeling. It is not about repeating the past or making something look old for the sake of it. It is about noticing what a place has carried, then translating that into something new. For this Liberty London Beauty Advent Calendar, I wanted to create a box for Christmas, yes, but also a box for memory, craft, history and the strange beauty of beginning again.