Westside story: Design of a restaurant and bar in London draws inspiration from the lively theatricality that surrounds it and from old-fashioned glamour - Brief Article

Architectural Review, The, April, 2002

West Street, a restaurant with a bar and tiny hotel by Wells Mackereth Architects, for Mirror Image Restaurants, is in a small narrow street of the same name on the edge of Covent Garden. Surrounded by theatres, offices, housing and shops, it has made itself a new part of West End life.

It has been inserted into two terraced buildings, six storeys high and dating from the turn of the twentieth century. The buildings were combined and rebuilt from the third floor down and the original mansards reshaped into a single half barrel-vaulted roof. The new configuration forms on plan a rough rectangle sliced diagonally along its eastern front by the street line. Looked at from the street, the two buildings are united by a full-height window across their width.

There are six levels: a basement bar, a lively canteen with wood burning oven on the ground floor, a more formal intimate restaurant on the first, and on the second floor a private dining room and offices. The upper two levels are devoted to what must be the smallest exclusive hotel in London, with two rooms on the third floor (one of which gives onto a broad terrace at the back) and another under the curve of the barrel-vaulted roof. The architects have made a virtue of awkward volumes and each room, furnished with austere luxury, has its own character.

Downstairs, the sombre treatment of the restaurant and bar interiors goes against prevailing passions for transparency and dematerialization. Planes of tiger-striped Macassar ebony, dark stone, and rich colours provide sumptuous backgrounds for pristine tablecloths and create a nocturnal impression even during the day. Such solid sensuality is balanced by the drama of floors cut away to create double- and triple-height voids at the front of the building, spanned at ground floor level by an entrance bridge. If the shop window is reminiscent of a cinema screen, the interior arrangement echoes the anatomy of theatre so that overlooked from ground and first floor levels, the basement bar becomes an orchestra pit.

The feeling of old-fashioned glamour, when the place is more or less empty and before the arrival of a modern clientele, is heightened on descending the ebony-lined stairs to the bar; and scenes drawn from evenings in Harry's Bar in Venice in the 1950s come to mind. (Partner James Wells thinks of old-fashioned gambling and geisha houses in Japan.)

The scheme is a thoughtful and original response to what must be the increasingly exigent demands of the London restaurateur who has to contend with the changing fashions of a capricious clientele. Wells Mackereth seem to have reconciled potentially conflicting elements - liveliness that attracts custom, and intimacy.

Underpinning the glamour is a carefully thought-out plan that provides increasing privacy as you move up the building. The sociability of the bar and ground floor gives way to the quiet black and cream formality of the first floor and private sophistication of the Blue Room above. Painted an intense royal blue, this room is equipped with screening facilities. Noise in these upper rooms did not seem to be a problem.

Detailing throughout is a pleasure; from Alan Fletcher's elegant signage at the entrance -- cast aluminium against stainless steel -- and entrance paving, to subtle illumination that enhances colour and picks up texture, and makes descent to the bar, past the tiger-striped wall, an event. P.M.