About
A bakery that bakes
Everything Silo sells across the counter — the bread, the pastries, even the jam — is made on the premises at Giles Street. That single fact explains most of the rest of the shop.
What they make
The bread list is genuinely a list rather than a category: a rye sourdough and a white one, vollkornbrot, stirato, baguettes, ciabattini, a casalinga on weekdays, raisin bread on Wednesdays and Saturdays, a walnut sourdough baguette that only turns up on Saturday. Baking to a day, rather than to a warehouse, is why the list reads that way.
The pastry side runs from plain croissants and pain au chocolat through to the tarts Silo is best known for, in five sizes from a single serve up to something that feeds thirty. Flavours follow the season, so the fig and the peach and raspberry come and go.
How the cafe fits
The kitchen cooks a short European-leaning menu that mostly exists to put the bakery's own bread to work — omelettes and poached eggs on toasted sourdough, a steak sandwich on their focaccia, a tarte flamiche. Breakfast runs from opening until 2:30pm and lunch starts at eleven, which suits a shop where the ovens set the schedule.
In Kingston
Silo trades Tuesday to Saturday, 7am to 3pm, and closes on Sunday and Monday. It is a small operation with a queue on Saturday mornings, near enough to the Kingston shops to be a habit for the people who live around it. Come early if there's something in particular you want.
The write-ups
“part Brooklyn, part wartime Parisian bakery”
“the best bakery in Canberra or anywhere within cooee”
The details
Studio note
Why this redesign exists
This site is a university exercise: pick an organisation you rate whose website you don't, and build them a better one. Silo's baking is not the problem.
What the original does to a reader
- One unbroken scroll with no navigation — the two "Menu" and "Bakery" tabs both link to #, so there is nowhere to go and no URL to send anyone.
- Contact details, ordering rules, opening hours and the full menu are stacked in one column, so finding out when it opens means reading past everything else.
- A "new menu coming soon" banner sits above the menu it undermines, and the footer still reads 2023.
- Dietary markers are two symbols explained at the bottom of the page, away from the food they describe.
- Set in a small default sans with little hierarchy, so a headline and a price look much the same.
What this does instead
- Four pages with real URLs, a persistent nav, and the current page marked — so a link to the menu is a link to the menu.
- Hours and address in the header of the home page and in the footer of every page, because that is what most visitors came for.
- Dietary and allergen information written as words, on the dish.
- A serif display face and a real type scale, so the page has a shape at a glance on a phone and at a desk.
- No stock photography. Their site has none and this one has no rights to any, and pictures of someone else's bakery would misrepresent theirs.
- Where Silo doesn't publish something — bakery prices, any founding history — this site says so rather than inventing it.
Everything factual here was read off silobakery.com.au. The prose is rewritten; the prices, hours and policies are theirs.