Clap Studio created quite an experience sunset in the restaurant Baovan Valencia.
The restaurant is located in a modernist building in the neighborhood of Ruzafa de Valencia and marks the first permanent position of Baovan, a local food truck delivering Chinese steamed bao buns that was launched during the coronavirus pandemic.
To make it, Baovan He asked Clap Studio to create an interior for the restaurant that will channel the motto from the company of beers, beach and baths.
"Our goal was to transport the user to a beach, from where they can see the sunset and enjoy some handmade baths," said the director of Clap Studio, angela montagud. "So we created an entire experience around the customer."
In an attempt to turn the restaurant's lack of natural light into a positive feature, Clap Studio designed an immersive interior that makes visitors feel like they've stumbled onto a secret beach. In this way, it would invite the user to enter and discover the interior.
The shape of the space was a challenge, as the designers were faced with a plan of narrow and elongated plant without natural light.
As for access, diners enter the restaurant through a porch, where dark green ropes hang from the ceiling like vines in a forest. The interior was designed to evoke a beach with one side finished in sandy peach and the other in deep ocean blue. The undulating textile panels form billowing clouds overhead that filter the light.
The centerpiece of the room is a crescent-shaped lighting panel that was programmed by the local creative studio Vitamin to recreate the changing colors of a sunset during the time it takes for the restaurant to complete its dinner service.
The interior shows a constant duality of colors that takes us in and out of the water. On the ceiling we recreate a blanket of clouds that provides a magical atmosphere to the interior, reflecting the lights of the sunset that is constantly moving.
The private dining room at the rear of the floor plan seats ten people and was designed to create the impression of dining by moonlight, showing synchrony with the rest of the space.
The circular and crescent symbols that make reference to the form of the bao buns are repeated throughout the space, from the lighting installation to the chairs.
Other projects of the Valencian practice include a playful children's shoe store and a fashion store-cafeteria in Hong Kong with stacked terracotta display pedestals and heavenly aluminum partitions.