Customers can leave their children playing downstairs and dine beside a four metre-high model elephant at this Bucharest restaurant.

Recently completed by Romanian designers Nuca Studio, Phill houses its restaurant on the first floor, while a playground, multi-function hall and café occupy the ground level below.

The elephant stands over the central staircase and appears to be listening to music from a painted-on mp3 player and headphones.

Circular openings create colourfully framed views between rooms, allowing parents to keep an eye on their children.

Other Dezeen stories featuring fun play areas include a series of sculptural trees for a high school and a house complete with slides and a ballpond.

Photography is by Cosmin Dragomir.

Here’s some more information from Nuca Studio:

Phill – Playground & Restaurant in Bucharest by Nuca Studio

Phill is a meeting place designed for the entire family. It has a playground, a multipurpose room and a small café at the ground floor and a restaurant at the second level.

The playground and the multipurpose room are enclosed areas with independent light and acoustic scenarios and they accommodate activities from theater and puppet shows to martial arts and ballet lessons.

In between them the small café communicates visually with the playground through a couple of round openings.

Upstairs, the dining area is an open space directly linked with the lobby.

The functions of the program have their own agenda but at the same time they work closely together therefore the connection of the individual spaces was very important.

In order to link these different rooms, the walls were perforated by transparent openings and a special attention was paid to the stairs design which climb their way to the second floor around a 4 meter tall elephant.

Attempting to be appealing to both children and adults the overall design draws its inspiration from vinyl toy and Manga culture, looking to be engaging and to capture the imagination of all visitors.

The exact formal sense of the ceiling's intricate geometry is open to interpretation as some of the shapes resulted from a meticulous handling of the complicated air duct system alongside the heavy concrete structure.

Project team: Robert Marin, Andrei Rotariu, Mihnea Vieru, Mircea Adrian Mihai

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Romanian studio Square One have completed a clothing store in Bucharest with pointy display stands and a network of black electrical cables.

Called Entrance, the monochrome interior features light bulbs weighted at the ends of electrical wires that create angular lines fanning out over the ceiling.

Angular display stands extend triangular volumes towards the ceiling.

One side of each emits light to illuminate the merchandise.

The information below is from SquareONE:

The concept began by trying to transform a space of 200 sqm in an allegory. Imaginary animals that abide in a surreal forest, a refuge, a route.

Thus it might sound pretentious, technical and formal achievement must remain simple, unsophisticated, a honest approach to the conceptual design, not supported by pretentious materials or sophisticated systems.

I tried to use as little graphics or decorative elements as possible to illustrate the concept, functional objects must do that. The shape of those object should tell the story.

A peculiarity of this arrangement is the fact that none of the objects used were purchased. All items being manufactured under the project.

The shapes and positions of the objects in central space was designed so as to create several routes for equal exposure of the emblematic products.

These objects have resulted from a formal synthesis by illustrating a number of three animals in motion.

Zoomorphic design and geometric shaping almost extreme minimal tried to minimize the decorative approach.

The use of very sharp angles (most angles on vertical objects under 45 degrees), gave more dynamism in the composition of objects, seen from different angles, they can change appearance.

I also preferred not close volumes for spatial geometry without spatiality, a kind of origami like 2D shell, which is in constant metamorphosis.

I used the ceiling to illustrate the trees made of black electrical wires which is also the lighting system, ceiling grid was invaded by black wires tensioned using weights that disguises lamp socket.

The Drawing of the electrical cables network creates the virtual habitat of the objects. A dynamic relation is created between the hanging branches of the light trees and the uprising vectors of each of the three objects

Dressing booths are like a refuge in the middle of a forest. Suggesting a sort of "glazing" to the rest of space, a media interface, composed of LCD screens, is placed on the exterior wall of the cabins. To display accessories and jewelry we created rectangular prismatic objects at different heights which seem to emerge from the floor surface in various areas with apparently random positioning.

Materials used were simple and inexpensive as can be. Furniture items are made from MDF polyurethane painted supported by light metal structures made of very thin sections (4mm diameter), whose stiffness comes from the way the structure geometry is closed. Two of the objects have a recessed translucent membrane in one of the vertical planes, in order to spread light on the exposing surface

The light trees are made from black electrical cable, energy saving light bulbs, cable clamps. The Weights which masks the light bulb sockets and tensions the cables, are made of painted metal pipe segments in black electrostatic paint. Objects displaying accessories are made of black and transparent Plexiglas.

Team:
Arh Adrian Cancer
Arh Sabin Dumitru

See also:

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