Nishimura Restaurant_ CL3 Architects
Beijing, China
This is an excerpt of an article from the
September 2008 edition of Architectural Record.
In a place like Beijing, where anything goes, designers often bring in art installations or bold flower arrangements to add verve to upscale interiors. But in their design of Nishimura, a Japanese restaurant on the second floor of Beijing’s Shangri-La Hotel, the architects at CL3 had no use for add-ons. Using mostly wood, the Hong Kong–based firm turned architecture into sculpture, creating a place that blurs the line between design and art.
“We try to avoid just buying artwork at the
end of a design and putting it everywhere,” says William Lim, managing director
of CL3, which Shangri-La invited to redesign Nishimura as part of a larger
project that included the renovation of the existing hotel and the addition of
an adjacent 142-room tower. In Hong Kong, CL3 had designed two branches of
Nadaman, a Japanese restaurant, in Shangri-La hotels, bringing in a consultant
to contribute stark dry floral arrangements. “But here we didn’t work with
another artist. Instead, we built art into our design,” explains Lim.
Entering the 5,400-square-foot restaurant,
visitors check in with the maître d’ at an oak-colored travertine desk
connected to a raised pool (made of the same travertine). Through a screen of
dark elm slats, they see a sake bar and get an oblique view of a 26-foot-long
partition assembled from 1,000 sheets of engineered plywood. As they approach
the partition, which separates the bar from a dining area, guests encounter the
restaurant’s coup de grâce: a pair of curvaceous openings dug into the
4-foot-thick wall. One cutout begins as a wide oval then narrows to a
moon-shaped hole on the opposite side—as if a giant knot had been gracefully
excised from an oversize chunk of lumber—while the other starts narrow and goes
wide. The result gives patrons on both sides of the wall tantalizing, shifting
views. Workers spent weeks laminating the precut sheets of plywood, then
sanding and smoothing them with wax. Apart from its aesthetic attraction, the
partition serves as a clever way of hiding two structural elements: a low beam
and a large column.
Lim’s inspirations—Japanese gardens and the
changing seasons—led him to plant dried cherry trees in beds of white pebbles
in places such as the teppanyaki room and to use a limited range of wooden
tones that signal a shift from cool to warm. The sun peeks into the restaurant
through a skylight in one of the dining areas.
Formal name of building: Interior Project:
Nishimura Restaurant
Location:
2/F, Shangri-La Hotel Beijing
29 Zizhuyuan Road
Beijing 100089, China
Completion Date: April 2007
Gross square footage: 498.6 m² sq.ft.
Owner: Beijing Shangri-La Hotel Limited
Architect:
CL3 Architects Limited
7/F, Hong Kong Arts Centre,
2 Harbour Road, Wanchai, Hong Kong
Phone : (852) 2527 1931
Fax : (852) 2529 8392
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