From the architect. This is a design plan for an Italian restaurant transferring into a commercial complex across Yachiyo Midorigaoka Station, a suburb of Tokyo. The restaurant is expected to hold populous parties with maximum capacity of 250 people, using the dining space and the banquet room. With this in mind, we took advantage of the existing large space with long pillar spans by keeping the use of fixed walls to a bare minimum and designed a spacious dining space that is partitioned by light and the ceiling pieces.
Large area with no walls could sometimes feel restless. To prevent this, we designed a dining space that is divided by “ceiling” and “light”; resulting in a comfortable and scale/temperature sensitive dining room that does not ruin the advantages of an open room.
Above the tables; are hanged “walls” attached to ceiling piece, dropped to FL2.2m dividing the dining area into eight sections. The height and the shape of each ceiling pieces are carefully set to compromise the building’s infrastructures running behind the original ceiling (this space was previously used as parking and therefore was the center of infrastructures of the building) The finishing color and lighting of these ceiling pieces are also diverse.
Though the dining area below the ceiling pieces is essentially one space, the eight separate areas show a variety of expressions depending on time of the day and light. Overlapping in layers or blurring the boundaries between tables, light and time create a room full of richness and depth. Our goal to provide a space with many different personalities to accommodate the needs of every customers regardless of age and generations, lead to a restaurant with many returning customers. We have visited the restaurant a few times since it opened and saw that the restaurant is loved by all ages, just as we assumed. We are certain that this restaurant of over 20 years of history in the community not only will be the new place to eat, but will become the place to be loved by the public as a new base of local community .
