| Notes from the designer |

Our team took on this restaurant project because we saw a scope to promote local materials and craft through our design. Chef’s Kitchen is an Indian Cuisine restaurant located in Dhanmondi, Shatmasjid Road. One interesting feature of this site is that each floor has different kinds of restaurant that catered to young crowds. Previously, this 1000 square feet space was an office that had to be completely transformed into a restaurant by the project team.

When we talk about Indian food, we can associate spices, vibrant colours and local flavor with it. So, in terms of the concept, the colors of Indian spices inspired us. We decided to design a warm, vibrant and colorful dining space to attract young customers. The defining colors were warm tones of brown, orange, beige and green. Similarly, the lighting was kept warm. We added a lot of greenery to give the eyes a rest.

Budget constrain was one of the challenges of this project. To overcome this, we thought it would be a good idea to do some adaptive reuse. That is also the main goal of our company. We always want to promote designs with zero waste. So, we worked with all local materials as well as recycled materials. We used many recycle and up cycle elements such as cane chair, bamboo light shed, clay pottery light shed.  For the wall decoration, we used reclaimed window shuttering from another project site. It created an interesting effect. We also used old printing blocks and batik stamp to create different motifs. Some wooden logs were used to make partitions.