North East & Yorkshire Premier Hospitality

Strada

Strada
Written by Roma Publications

Strada

 Strada

Italian restaurant group Strada has been undertaking refurbishments of their restaurants across the country. Restaurants in Sheffield and Reading have undergone renovation, with more sites planned over the next year that will see restaurants given a fresh and brighter look.

Design studio, Studio C102, were commissioned by Strada to refurbish and reinvigorate some of its key existing sites. An initial batch of four sites has been completed, including Leopold Square, Sheffield, Oracle Centre, Reading and St Katharine’s Dock, London.

Kyriakos Katsaros, Founder of Studio C102, spoke to Premier Hospitality magazine about the refurbishment.

He said: “We were appointed last autumn to look at a targeted re-fresh refurbishment programme. The brief was to recapture the essence of Strada and take the next step to bring them forward to 2016. We wanted to make them brighter and more exciting, make the design feel more fresh and unfussy because the restaurant interiors had become progressively darker which can be uninviting at lunchtime.”

A stripped-back palette of contemporary materials and colours were selected to create restaurants that are bright, welcoming and unpretentious, yet sophisticated. The new design uses colours and materials that are a lot fresher than the current look with interesting furniture and lighting incorporated.

Kyriakos added: “The design uses a mixture of British and Scandinavian fittings and the colour palette is fresher with brass detailing to work with the existing waiter stations. We don’t like using a lot of paint and laminate and if the budget and time frame allows, we use materials in their raw form, like sheets of brass that will weather a lot better than laminates.”

Strada

The refurbishments were undertaken over a four and a half day period, providing a fast turn around for the restaurants, ensuring that they weren’t closed for a long period of time.

“Leopold Square is a beautiful building with exposed structural elements that we were able to highlight in the design, making that quite site specific, but still in keeping with the new interior brand identity that we developed with Strada,” said Kyriakos. “The idea was that the restaurant shut on a Sunday morning and re-opened on a Friday night. It was a very fast turn around and the work was limited to the front of house areas. To achieve this some of the new joinery and bespoke light features had to be prefabricated.”

The main contractors on the project were WFC.

Kyriakos concluded: “Working with an established brand that is looking to reinvigorate itself is exciting. We have worked with some very interesting brands but they are mostly in the early stages of their development, so that makes it a very different challenge.”

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Roma Publications