Rus in urbs: Spanish grasslands inspire Binom Architects’ Islington restaurant fit-out

Working to refit out a family-run Spanish restaurant in Islington, north London-based practice Binom Architects looked to draw on ideas of the landscape from where much of the food for the restaurant is sourced. 

This is from the southern area of Extremadura where the for generations the family has reared livestock, including acorn-fed pigs. The area is a grassland habitat, known in Spanish as dehesa and Binom’s design was intended to instil a feeling of this ‘open, semi-barren yet atmospheric and beautiful environment’. 

The interior design employs a combination of rough textures such as painted brick and woven steel mesh with glossy glazed ceramics above the bar, intended to represent this mixture of the urban and rural.

The lighting scheme can be changed from a gentle one relying more on natural daylight to one making full use of the back-lit panels at night, which have been designed using images of the dehesa fields. 

The restaurant seats up to 40 people with tapas served in the bar area. Binom has designed the restaurant tables, the long concrete bar that is visible from the street and the lighting feature above it, made of ceramic pots, some which have downlighting integrated within them. All the ceramics for the piece were sourced from a workshop in Salvatierra de los Barros, with Binom using Rhino 3D modelling to help design and assemble it.