‘Don’t waste your space’ should be the motto every restaurant and bar lives by. After all, what goes on the walls, furniture and floors of a restaurant can build up the atmosphere of the space, and subtly point customers to the value and quality of the food on offer.
Eleven Inch Pizza, located in the Docklands precinct in Melbourne, is a restaurant that seeks to serve fresh and authentic pizzas for a discerning business clientele wanting a fast but good quality meal. Its bold interiors, simple colours and graphic forms reflect this ethos and branding.
Definitely no space is wasted within this 93sqm restaurant. Based on an existing food concept that was originally developed for a Melbourne CBD laneway, the Docklands outlet uses the Eleven Inch branding as the starting point for the design.
Branding starts with a brand of course, so a neon 11” logo sits proudly on top of a graphic wall, playfully reminiscent of a brightly-lit fast food outlet.
Opposite this feature wall, the bulkhead over the kitchen is lined with angled, luminous green aluminium fins that are made of painted and anodised aluminium from Sapphire Aluminium. These fins reflect the angular perspective of the graphic wall and, with the bursts of lime throughout the space, provide an alternative focal point.
“Building this bulkhead was the most challenging construction element,” says Hanna Richardson of Zwei Interior Architecture, the firm in charge of the project.
“The design was complex and needed significant thinking and close working with the builder to ensure it was realised.”
Below this bulkhead stands the main counter with a Wattyl ‘Ebony’ colorwood interior stain, where hungry eyes automatically travel to.
The design colour palette was an important consideration for Zwei. Various shades of black are used extensively throughout the restaurant’s walls, ceilings and doors, which creates a dramatic backdrop for the Eleven Inch branding, and allows the pops of Dulux ‘sunny green’ to stand out.
“The walls reflect the logo back to the customer through ply cut-outs and repetition,” says Richardson, who notes that surfaces are dominated by plywood, which were reinterpreted throughout the space.
The selected plywood is plantation grown hoop pine sourced from Queensland DPI Forestry, utilising low VOC binding glue. Except for the servery where it is routed and stained to subtly reflect the bulkhead above, all timber surfaces are minimally treated with a water-based sealant, Setol interior matt plus.
The plywood mostly remains in large sheets, and were created so that they can be easily re-used at the end of the design’s lifespan.
Richardson says that the application of the selected paints and stains were crucial in delivering the overall design of the space.
“As a project, Eleven Inch Pizza demonstrated the ideal synergy between designer, client and customer. The design needed to recognise and maintain the integrity of the existing brand whilst responding to the specific target market representative of the Docklands precinct.”
But, the challenge of having to enlist a fresh approach to compliment both the food offering as well as maintain the currency in a rapidly evolving location was welcomed by Zwei.
Stripped-back yet creative, the design of this gourmet pizza place showcases its own individuality and leverages the existing 11” brand strength.
Photography by Michael Kai, courtesy of Zwei.
