Como is an Italian restaurant in the heart of Yerevan, named after a well-known lake in Northern Italy. This is our bureau's first project in Armenia, and it was important for us to make it memorable and put a pin on the city's restaurant map. Since this is an all-day restaurant, the interior is universal and adaptable to any scenario. Here you can just have a coffee or have breakfast with friends, have lunch with a colleague or have a family dinner.
Our main task was to transport the guests to the atmosphere of Italy, but at the same time to organically fit the interior into the environment. To achieve this, we were inspired by Italian culture and used spatial and visual techniques in the design.
Spatial technique
The restaurant is in an elongated room with windows placed only on its short side. It was important for us to make the guests want to sit not only by the windows but also in the far side of the room, evenly filling the whole restaurant. For this purpose, we used our favourite technique - interior in the interior. We divided the space of the hall into 3 main parts and came up with a certain trick for each of them. We imagined the furthest part of the hall as a backyard, the central part as a summer veranda with an open kitchen, and the front part as an open area.
Visual technique
We decided not to create a reference to an old, shabby Italian street, but to recreate the feeling of luxury of an Italian salon. The interior is filled with beautiful and comfortable furniture, multi-seat tables, and decorations of sculptural screens that look like curtains, while leather and wood dominate the textures. Sculptural screens form interesting accents. One in the first room seems to envelop the wall, another in the far hall frames the sofa seat like a theatre curtain, and the third screen, at the entrance to the bathroom, serves as a sliding door.
Unifying the space
The wooden ceiling runs through the entire restaurant and unites all of its parts into a single piece. It fulfils not only a decorative function but also hides a huge amount of engineering and communications. We paid a lot of attention to working with light and spent a long time looking for a balance between natural and artificial lighting. With this balance, the atmosphere of the restaurant changes throughout the day. During the day, the space is lit by natural light, while in the evening, it is completely transformed by the change of the lighting.
Importance of client involvement
We have been lucky with our clients - they have been actively involved in the process of creating the interior and adding details to it. They ordered fully customised crockery, spent a huge amount of time creating the project playlist and even flew to another country to choose the suiting old brick for the flooring and bar tops. With the spatial and visual techniques we used in this project, we were able to create a space that is both cohesive and multifunctional. A space that makes each of its visitors feel safe and comfortable.
Team:
DA bureau: Anna Lvovskaia, Boris Lvovskiy, Fedor Goreglyad, Maria Romanova
Project team: Anna Lvovskaia, Boris Lvovskiy, Fedor Goreglyad, Maria Romanova, Elizaveta Zholtaya, Elizaveta Vanicheva
Photography: AniSon Architectural Photography
