studio modijefsky unveils gitane in central amsterdam
From Reserving.com’s immersive Metropolis Campus interiors to buzzing bars, bistros, lodges, and spas, Studio Modijefsky‘s pool of hospitality initiatives celebrates the artwork of making memorable areas seeped in shade, textures, and custom. The ladies-led inside structure and design observe was established in central Amsterdam the place its newest restaurant venture, Gitane, got here to life earlier this summer season.
Designed for celebrated Younger Chef Angelo Kremmydas, whose meals ooze cross-cultural flavors served with out pretension, Gitane achieves an ambiance of informal magnificence, engulfing guests in heat picket tones, intricate textures, and inventive geometries. A floor flooring, mezzanine, and bar make up the eating house, every catering to completely different moods and occasions of day. Collectively, they welcome a consuming and eating environment the place everybody, from meals connoisseurs to residents, will really feel at house. ‘Good areas are nice settings for brand new reminiscences‘, shares Studio Modijefsky’s founder Esther Stam in a latest designboom interview, following the discharge of Gitane.
Gitane (2023), Amsterdam | all photos © Maarten Willemstein
A picket vestibule with coloured glass nudges guests into the bottom flooring, the place a double-height restaurant house reveals a big, dark-orange neon ‘BAR’ signal atop the doorway. The room options a mixture of traditional and customized furnishings and lighting, together with classic café chairs, tall lamps, arched home windows, leather-finished barstools, and terrazzo-integrated benches. Two steps beneath, the bar space holds a zigzag-shaped terrazzo construction with pink accents recalling the outside’s brick facade. Contrasting the bar is a marbled tiled flooring and a darkish brown aged mirror ceiling that displays the lighting spheres and patterns of the sculptural bar beneath, capturing the play between sturdy, weathered supplies, and the recent tiles and terrazzo.
The mezzanine, in the meantime, connects to the bottom flooring by means of a geometrical rattan ceiling sample and an authentic picket staircase. Studio Modijefsky adorned this stage with a railing of metallic brown vertical components alongside the sting, massive home windows, a service space, tables, benches, and a banquette, all endowed with zigzagging particulars. Lastly, an outside terrace alongside the facade invitations a gathering round customized picket love seats underneath striped pink and orange awnings.
The soothing design narrative at Gitane effortlessly displays and emblematizes founder Esther Stam’s mission to reinvent how individuals work together with an inside. Learn on as Stam unpacks that mission in a latest dialog with designboom — discussing Studio Modijefsky’s method to hospitality design, materials compositions, heritage and locality, and rather more.
Gitane (2023), Amsterdam: a restaurant for Chef Angelo Kremmydas
interview: founder esther stam on her hospitality ideas
designboom (DB): When was Studio Modijefsky based, and what initiatives did you first begin engaged on?
Esther Stam (ES): Studio Modijefsky was based in 2009 by me, Esther Stam. After I first began, I labored on many issues — from prepare station tunnels to customized furnishings items, from workplace areas to pageant phases. A few of my first hospitality initiatives had been Visaandeschelde — a Fish restaurant within the south of Amsterdam, a collaboration with Studio Molen and Piet de Gruyter — and an area bar in Amsterdam West.
DB: How did you go into hospitality design? How has your type/method on this sector advanced over time?
ES: I used to be all the time fascinated by hospitality. It’s an atmosphere that evokes me, feeds me, and the place individuals go to take pleasure in life and have a good time, share tales, and create new ones. It’s areas the place you calm down and revel in a distinct surroundings, expertise new flavors and music, meet individuals, and have completely different interactions. Good areas are nice settings for brand new reminiscences. Our method hasn’t modified in essence. We have a look at idea, context, historical past, gentle, architectural environment, spatial options, meals that might be served, drinks that might be poured, individuals that may go to, music that might be performed, graphic id, pure environment, and native traditions and supplies… There’s a huge analysis resulting in a powerful and distinctive design language that’s site-specific and tailored. We refine our analysis and methods to design. Our information of supplies continues to be rising, in addition to our community of pros, craftsmen, and folks we collaborate with, making our designs much more distinctive and refined.
Gitane (2023), Amsterdam: creating informal magnificence
DB: Digging deeper into your method — every of your initiatives radiates with colours, layers, and textural richness. What emotional responses or impressions do you want to convey by means of your compositions?
ES: We method each venture with an open thoughts and nil preconceptions. But time and time once more, we’re drawn in direction of the identical issues: authenticity, craftsmanship, patterns in nature, pale finishes, timeworn supplies, daylight transferring by means of an area, distinctive architectural options, native traditions — and lists. We love lengthy lists. We’re not interested in all this stuff as a result of they’re visually interesting however as a result of they spark an emotional response {that a} pristine end can’t. A rumpled, distressed floor piques our curiosity and calls out to be touched. The form of a desk leg refers to a chapter of that constructing’s historical past. Lighting directs you subliminally to the a part of the house you didn’t know you needed to be.
We provoke these bodily and emotional responses with tales rooted in a constructing’s location. Step one is to delve right into a constructing’s origins, structure, and former makes use of. These kind the seeds of an idea, the beginning of a narrative. To convey these tales to life, we use six instruments: supplies, volumes, gentle, shade, textures, and shapes. Every instrument affords a number of design prospects by itself, nevertheless it’s solely when the instruments are utilized collectively that they understand their full potential. For instance, how colours, shapes, and supplies are seen, felt, and appreciated will depend on the sunshine and textures we add for tactility. The amount of an area, the scale, and form of the objects we fill it with instigate interactions and switch static interiors into thrilling adventures. Combining our instruments empowers us to translate the info behind our idea into one thing rather more poetic: the subsequent chapter in a location’s story.
