Beau
Winner Best Restaurant Design Eat Drink Awards 2023
Nestled within a refurbished inner-city laneway in Sydney’s Surry Hills, Beau is a refined and bespoke 200sqm hospitality venue spread across two separate ground floor tenancies for the Nomad Group. The rear tenancy, is a boutique 50 seat neighbourhood wine bar serving locally sourced produce and exceptional wines. The front space serves as a bakery offering signature baked breads and accommodates the main purpose-built commercial kitchen.
Beau is a functional yet refined space. The project required negotiating with the complexities of connecting two separated retail tenancies within a laneway to become a bakery and wine bar with a singular vision. Both spaces are anchored by monolithic bars and kitchen benches. Calm and tactile, these stone plinths add symmetry and theatre, placing ‘working’ and ‘making’ as the visual centrepiece of the spaces.
The front space, in keeping with the industrial quality of a bakery, features stainless steel bulkheads and white granite benches bathed in daylight. The rear tenancy in contrast, is a dramatic, dark interior featuring polished concrete floors, raw steel joinery, and textured black granite surfaces illuminated in soft pools of light.
Connecting the dark and light spaces are continuous caramel leather banquettes and solid oak tables. These banquettes run parallel to the floor-to-ceiling windows peering into the laneway and create a relationship with the warm brick walls of the neighbouring buildings. The gently swaying steel mesh ceiling installation conceals services and lighting fixtures. An emphasis on craft is explored in the crisp detailing of the joinery, handwoven metal curtains, the sanded stainless steel and custom oil staining of the black steel.
Beau uses a texturally refined palette crafted with precise detailing and a sensitive composition of joinery and furniture to create a high level of design resolution and visual harmony. This venue is a reflection of our client’s approach to their dining and customer experience – timeless, aesthetically refined and exceptionally crafted.
SMART DESIGN STUDIO ARCHITECTURE FROM THE INSIDE OUT