When you go out to eat, ambience and comfort can be just as important as what's on your plate. Emma Cullinan visits two Dublin restaurants with superior interiors
Fast-food restaurants put their customers under the glare of bright lights in open spaces where everything is visible. It has a purpose: serving customers quickly and making them feel slightly edgy means they won't want to spend hours in the place. Other restaurants also create interiors that will appeal to the people they want to attract. Here's how two Dublin restaurateurs changed their interiors to please a changing clientele.
When the architect Paul Quilligan opened Havana, on Grantham Street in Dublin, with two siblings in 2000, the trio went with their intuition about the sort of place they would like. One influence was his brother Steve's time living in Spain, hence the tapas-bar notion. "Its success took us by surprise," says Quilligan. "We had tapped into people's consciousness. We recognised that people required an alternative to a pub, but they didn't always want the formality of a restaurant, and they wanted to be able to eat at any time of the day. It's that idea of a cafe-bar that Michael McDowell has been talking about."
The Quilligans believe that their success comes from the way the restaurant is designed. In their first restaurant, space is tight and the atmosphere is cosy. The bar is in the centre of the room, so, although tables are served by waiting staff, customers also have easy access to staff at the bar, should they need anything. The second Havana restaurant, which has just opened on South Great George's Street, is a larger space, but the easy-going atmosphere of the first Havana was re-created.
"It's been designed so that when you enter, you have a subliminal feeling of comfort and friendliness," says Quilligan. "When you come in, you see the whole interior space first and then see the things in it." The colours are quite subdued, with cigar-shaded walls (we're in Havana after all), blue and green furniture, and parquet floor. All of the furniture was designed by Quilligan and made in Dublin. "Having things made specially makes it a different, more personal space," he says. There's a simple palette of steel, wood and fabric, blended so that none is overemphasised.
There are links to the first Havana premises in the bespoke stainless-steel bottle and glass holder suspended above the bar. Although the interiors are different, items such as these, and the large artwork on the wall by Hugh McCarthy, link the two restaurants. The layout of the interior is essentially a rectangle within a rectangle, with the smaller volume comprising the bar and the kitchen above it. This enables some customers to sneak into a quieter area at the back of the room. The rectangular box also creates pockets of space, enhanced by the use of mirrors, which give a diagonal dynamic to the room. "We tried to build up and break down materials to create nodes," says Quilligan. "When the place is full this enables three parts of energy. You'll see that in, for instance, art-gallery openings, where there are different areas of buzz and people can move between them."
Mark Shannon, of Bistro One in Foxrock, Dublin, has also restyled his restaurant recently. Shannon began his restaurant with the loan of five tables and some crockery ("nothing matched") and then, in line with the bistro theme, created a safe, homely, gingham look. His philosophy of serving organic food and seasonal produce - you'll get only Irish strawberries here, and farmed salmon isn't allowed near the place - has created loyal customers, many of whom come here weekly.
Bistro One encourages its regular clients to treat the place as their diningroom (many even have their own off-list wines and dishes). For years, this cosiness was created by red Victorian-style lights above the tables, which were clad in red and white gingham tablecloths; the ceiling was crossed by decorative timber beams.
With a recent extension, the owners took the opportunity to update the interior, and the task facing their designer, Paul Austen, was to create a restaurant that was bang up to date but still welcoming.
Austen has transformed the interior, with all sorts of planes breaking up the space: from mirrors and chalkboards to windows knocked through walls to link spaces, and panels of timber flooring on the walls. "I've made sure that every seat has some sort of view, and no one will end up just facing a wall. You'll always see reflections in mirrors, even if you aren't quite sure where the person you are half-glimpsing is actually sitting."
Some wall panels are punctured with pin lights; others are set out from the wall with an orange glow emanating from the lights behind them. "I wanted to make it look as if the walls are floating," Austen says.
The toilet doors have red lights for women and blue for men. At the start, this was the only indication as to who was to go where, and customers were forever entering the wrong rooms, so the doors now have standard signs. In the bathrooms, round basins sit on oval tables designed by Austen, and in the men's toilet dark plywood curves around the soil-vent pipe, offering a sleek solution to hiding plumbing fixtures.
The Bistro One scheme has pulled off the remarkable trick of providing a cutting-edge interior with warmth and inventiveness. Although wooden flooring is on parts of the wall, the floor itself is carpeted. With openings in walls and slanted mirrors, the link between the old room and the new has been cleverly smudged. "Clients will request a quiet corner for a business meeting," Shannon says, "and we can provide that now."
He points out that even simple changes in design can transform spaces. A rectangular table beside the bar used to be the most unpopular place to sit, but the round table that has replaced it, offering a better view of the room, has become the place to be. Customers have embraced the new look, with many being made to feel part of the change. "One customer said to me last week: 'See, I was right about having mirrors here,' " says Shannon. What he's really noticed is that staff are much happier to join a restaurant with a good interior. "People are impressed when they come for job interviews." u
Havana, South Great George's Street, Dublin 2, 01-4005990; Bistro One, Brighton Road, Foxrock, Dublin 18, 01-2897711; Paul Austen is at 087-2360897