The brief: phased redecoration of a working restaurant
The restaurant's history begins in 2010. The place had been open for more than ten years and parts of it had simply aged out of the room — not badly, just visibly. The condition was the one that shapes everything else: the restaurant stays open. The work had to happen in stages, between services, without the guests ever seeing a building site.
Concept: contrast instead of erasure
Before proposing anything, I went through the restaurant's history, the brand book, the original interior concept and the symbols the brand had used for a decade. A ten-year-old interior is not a blank page — it is a place people already have memories of, and erasing it would have cost more than it returned. So I started with the colour and texture palette, adding contrast rather than replacing what was there. The new elements read as deliberate accents against the existing room, which is what makes a partial refresh look intentional.
Starting with the entrance
The first stage was the entrance area on the ground floor. It was the easiest place to test the new concept. A refresh that begins at the door sets the expectation for everything behind it.
Custom furniture, lighting and colour palette
I built the palette from the brand's own colours and designed the furniture and lighting to order. Every element — the upholstery, the fixtures, the handcrafted details — was drawn, specified and checked in production. In a working restaurant this stage is unforgiving: pieces have to arrive finished, fit the first time and be installed overnight, because there is no second attempt with guests arriving at noon.
Result: a refresh the regulars noticed
The project is still moving through its stages. What already works is the thing that is hardest to plan for: regular guests notice that their restaurant is changing, and they read the change as care rather than disruption.
Refreshing a room that cannot close is a different discipline from decorating an empty one. The sequence matters as much as the palette: what changes first, what has to survive the transition, what can wait a season. It is closer to staging than to renovation — and it is the part of hospitality work I find most interesting.
