Clementine’s latest location offers a swirl of neighborhood-specific design elements

In the Central West End, Tamara Keefe and Frank Uible set out to design their most elegant and beautiful ice cream shop.

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Clementine’s Naughty and Nice Creamery, now with eight metro area shops and a new local production facility capable of supplying 45 more, has added to its portfolio of stores this year with locations in the Central West End and Edwardsville. Owner Tamara Keefe and Brand Curator Frank Uible are evaluating locations in Ladue and downtown St. Louis, too. 

Keefe and Uible have a division of labor that plays to their strengths. While Uible manages the design of each store, Keefe—known as “the flavor temptress”—develops, produces, and markets the ice cream, now available in more than 40 flavors. 

The CWE location, which opened in May at 308 N. Euclid, is the result of a five-year search. From its inception, Uible said it would be Clementine’s most elegant and beautiful, with its black-painted exterior, typical of the neighborhood storefronts, and large pane windows with transoms backlit in Clementine’s signature mint green shade. Both the booth seating in each window bay and the prime perch, a cozy alcove right in the middle of the store, were inspired by a trip to London and Paris. “Tamara and I were struck by how well people were connecting in these little oases,” he says. “Maybe it’s a reaction to the hard, industrial, wide-open spaces that have been so popular for the last 15 years,” he says. “Those little sanctuaries feel good to us right now.”  

At 2,000 square feet, the store is also Clementine’s largest to date. It includes such original architectural features as a tin ceiling and exposed brick, as well as new additions, like a black-and-white hexagonal-tile floor, beadboard wainscot, and chair rail in the same colors. 

As in the other stores, the drywall above is painted what Uible calls “sweet mint.” (At Sherwin-Williams, Clementine’s Ice Cream is now a commercial paint color.) Keefe and Uible discovered it unexpectedly while looking for a paint scheme for their house in Lafayette Square. In addition to that shade, they came upon a range of dusty pastels—lavender, pink, a moody orange—that are all used in the company’s branding. “It was the perfect palette for Clementine’s,” says Uible, “but it’s funny—we never used the colors in our home.”

So many famous writers—T.S. Eliot, Tennessee Williams, Kate Chopin, William S. Burroughs—have called the CWE home, and Uible wanted to pay homage to the written word. An “obsession with fonts and typography” led him to seek out “inexpensive found objects” to use as décor. Among them: garage sale dinner plates bearing such ice cream–themed quotes as Forrest Gump’s “Lieutenant Dan! Ice cream!” and Iain Pears’ “A day without ice cream was a day wasted.” The fun continues with an ice cream–themed wallpaper designed by Jim Harper of Harper’s Bizarre in Edwardsville and in a series of prints and photos whose subjects clutch ice cream cones–all suitable backdrops for Instagram moments.

Artist Phil Jarvis hand-lettered the menus onto a wall of chalkboards and painted a 1904 World’s Fair–theme mural promoting “The Ice Cream Cone, A New Way to Eat Ice Cream.” 

“The World’s Fair was held minutes from us in Forest Park,” says Uible, adding: “We had to celebrate that, somehow, in some way.”

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