Luxury, splendid materiality and landscape integration in this design of a contemporary arabesque style restaurant building that accomodates two fine dinning restaurants and one arabic cafe on roof top terrace.
With the friendly leadership of Mardi Architecture & Design, with whom we collaborated in a couple projects some years ago, we concentrated on the preliminary design of these restaurants in Seef District, Bahrain.
After a first study with three different versions that allowed both the architectural team and the client to clarify the distribution, we produced a very compact design.
The three restaurants are organized around a central patio with water and landscape features as main elements. Dining and lounge seating are distributed in indoor and outdoor spaces, with a delicate landscaping and terraces at different levels that create a quite but dynamic atmosphere.
The design of the façade was one of the keys of the design, and we went through different versions. Version 1 as shown on the slideshow above had a modern interpretation of a mashrabiya in the upper floors and glass in the ground floor. A second version covered the whole façade with mashrabiya at different depths.
As foreigners we enjoyed the Mashrabiya versions, but I can understand the clients would push for a fritted-glass façade as shown in versions 3 and 4. Or, what finally came to be (as later developed by Mardi design), a reinterpretation of the façade of the Thai Lounge at the Carlton Hotel, also by Mardi Design, a project that has proven very successful. I can also understand that our concern with bioclimatic architecture is not fully appreciated in a country where energy is sooo unexpensive.
Our team worked hard to meet the deadlines and deliver a good design, with the help of Carlo Mezzino in the early stages, and our senior architects and friends, Lefteris Theodosis, Alejandra Rodriguez and Milena Tosic, also in charge of the splendid rendering.
Yosko Navarro Arquitectura 