This will date you: which of these is retro-ironic, and which simply passé? Raffia-covered Chianti bottles used as lampstands and candlesticks, or bright yellow and blue appearing as feature paintwork colours and in ceramic accessories? One comes from the late 1960s/early 1970s, and the other from the early 1990s; but each had their interior design origins in restaurants.
Restaurant design used to prefigure interior design by about six months, as the latest hot and hip trends from our nights out filtered through to make their presence felt in the home. Travel and the internet have speeded up that process, and at the same time, in order to feed our fantasies of the ultimate evening out, restaurant design has got more creative, extreme and even entirely outlandish.
A new tome by glossy coffee table book supremos, Taschen, celebrates the 100 winners and nominees in the Restaurant and Bar Design Awards. So what new looks might we expect to appear in a design obsessed or hipster home near you? Which are destined to become contemporary design clichés? And what really should be left out on the street?
Wooden cascades One of the biggest looks, judging from the number of restaurants featuring it, is construction. Not “construction” as in scaffolding, earthworks and men in hard hats, but wooden cascades, screens, partitions, and organic-style growths, spreading overhead. An obvious answer to the problems of trying to create intimacy in huge rooms with overly high ceilings, they can be seen from New York’s Innuendo to Tsujita in Los Angeles, A Cantina in Santiago de Compostela to Cocteau in Beirut. It’s not a trend to hit Ireland yet, although artist Maud Cotter has been making delicious pieces on a similar theme for years – in 2006, she installed a lovely one: House, in Cork city’s Courthouse (maudcotter.com).
There aren’t any Irish examples in the Taschen book, which is a shame. As restaurant reviewer with this newspaper, Catherine Cleary has seen more than her fair share of restaurant interiors and has developed some particular aversions (see her column in this Saturday’s Irish Times).
Cleary says that Irish restaurants have gone beyond the idea of mimicking “the good room”, though sometimes she despairs of the more macho bare walls and pared back look beloved of many. “It raises noise levels,” she says, “so the whole thing gets shoutier and shoutier”.
This trend is shared around many of the Design Award nominees, including the Workshop in Palm Springs, and Höst in Copenhagen. It has already made its presence felt in architecture: as participants in last year’s Open House tours discovered at Peter Carroll of A2 architects’ house on Lucky Lane, and Eamon Peregrine’s award winning Courtyard Extension, also in Dublin.
Rusty hatchets Some restaurant design features make you wonder exactly what ambiance they were thinking of creating. The rusty looking hatchets in Cleaver East in Temple Bar’s Clarence Hotel don’t exactly whet my appetite, and I can’t think they’ll be making it into the domestic setting any time soon. On the other hand, as Dublin’s housing shortage continues to grab headlines, what about the solution offered at Bangalore Express in London? Dining booths stacked like bunk beds. Why did no one think of that before . . . Indeed.
Restaurants and art are another set of regular bedfellows. In Las Vegas many years ago, I was bemused to realise that at Renoir, in the Mirage Hotel, the Renoirs were real, though the French bistro fake. Something similar was going on at the nearby Picasso in the Bellagio. The trend to note today is for big, loud, statement art that screams of how much it cost to buy, dominating dining spaces, just as it is coming to dominate the living spaces of the super rich around the world. See examples at Germain in Paris and Tramshed in London. Tramshed boasts a large Damien Hirst cow in formaldehyde, Cock and Bull, 2012. Hirst’s previous foray into restaurant design came with his Pharmacy venture in London’s Notting Hill, which ran from 1998 to 2003. When it folded, Hirst auctioned the medicine cabinets he had designed for the space. As art works, they raised more than €11 million at Sotheby’s.
The restaurant-to-domestic design traffic isn’t all one way any more either. As pop-up and short-lease spaces abound, inexpensive DIY design has become a feature of the hospitality trade as much as the home. See it in the mismatched china and seating so beloved of cupcake-selling cafes, and discover an abundance of Ikea in brash and/or quirky new dining spots everywhere.
Wine as design feature is another constant. Aureole in Las Vegas, which doesn’t appear in the Taschen book, has a four-story wine tower as its centrepiece, down which “wine angels” abseil to get you the bottle of your choice. Wine is also a part of the décor of London’s Carbon Bar, as well as Jerusalem’s Little Italy. Dublin restaurant Super Miss Sue’s uses back lit Campari bottles to cover most of one wall.
Will this particular trend catch on at home? Or is it unlikely you’d be able to keep bottles on display, unopened, for long enough to find out? If that’s the case, you might want to make your home just like a room in a fancy hotel, and take a leaf out of Amsterdam hot spot Minibar’s book: yes, there’s a series of glass-fronted mini-bars taking up half the space. The owners say they wanted “to bring the convenience of having a fridge at home to a night out in the city”. Out-of-date milk and something unspecified covered in cling film not supplied.
Restaurant and Bar Design is published by Taschen, €32.99
