Sense and sensuality - Italian restaurant Sapore in Melbourne, Australia

Architectural Review, The, Nov, 1996

An Italian restaurant in Melbourne, Australia, departs from the usual designer chic, creating more mysterious sculptural spaces.

Tom Kovac's troglodytic tendencies, previously expressed in his interior for the Capitol nightclub in Melbourne (AR May 1995), have recently been trained on the design of the Sapore, an Italian restaurant on St Kilda's Esplanade. The immediate surroundings full of self-conscious new restaurants have become the city's designer/gourmet quarter; and Kovac's response to the design-laden fray on the street has been to withdraw from it. Externally, the Sapore's presence is discreet, there is only a simple white facade inset with big glass doors that can be swivelled open so that the pavement terrace, set with tables and chair, becomes an extension of the interior. A consequence of this public discretion - which seems to promise more - is that the restaurant has attracted a great deal of attention.

Kovac's tendency to design from the inside out creates interior spaces that look as if they have been scooped out of an existing body - which in this case, they have. His preoccupation with spatial dynamics, plastic (sometimes visceral) form and surface has been shaped by an interest in film-making, in particular in the diffuse metaphysical worlds created by such directors as Antonioni and Kurasawa. All this is evident in his work.

Kovac himself is good at creating equivocal spaces in which the usual architectural definitions of dimensions are blurred. Behind Sapore's austerely orthogonal entrance are caverns of light and shadow, defined by billowing surfaces that, split here and there by openings, flow towards the top of the building. A second womb-like dining room hovers over the main dining room at first floor level reached by crossing a bridge spanning the void above the bar.

Underlying a romantic minimalism, is Kovac's pragmatic attention to a tight budget. The restaurant was inserted into a two-storey, double-fronted Victorian building, that had once contained a shabby pizzeria. This was stripped down to the shell and part of the upper floor removed; the interior was then clothed by sculpted plasterboard which, while modelling space, prosaically conceals the services. Existing stairs and passages were retained and the bridge fashioned out of an existing beam.