RESTAURANT GARDEN
LANDMARK OUTDOOR SPACES CREATION
High end venues in Bali usually capitalize on the site views and location. This restaurant had neither.
The outdoor spaces were purely ornamental as if in 2D only, they had no character, no purpose and they looked incidental at best.
The first thing was to create view lines and perspective to guide the guests’ eyes, as these elements were missing from the first project when the restaurant was built.
We then created an outdoor lounge that added polyvalent seated spaces to the restaurant formal u-shaped dining room, in order to bring balance between the indoors and outdoors spaces and to provide new guests experiences.
A succession of oversized items and a selection of high-quality noble materials were used both to create the perspective and to materialize the way to this new space.
Further down the garden, after the new lounge area, we designed a modern Balinese version of a classic French garden, creating perspective with water canals illuminated by large floating candles at night.
We used custom-made pots and weathering steel for a resolutely uncluttered, simple living space. This was the first garden of the sort in Bali.
The strength of the project, inspired by a hotel in California, resides in its simplicity and in the two perspective lines created, the first one from the entrance to the lounge, and the second one from the lounge to the water & fire garden.
The apparent simplicity of the place was actually technically very challenging to obtain, it required a lot of construction works for foundations, ground leveling, draining and for the water canal that had to feel like it was naturally flowing down and the same time overflowing on all sides.
The construction standards and process in South-East Asia are very different from the ones I was used to working in US and Europe. This project required flexibility and adaption from the parties involved and at all the stages.
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