co.arch . mmio design studio

“Wang Jiao 1” chinese restaurant . Milan

co.arch . mmio design studio . photos: © DiambraMariani

It is a project for the renovation of an existing Chinese restaurant.

The idea was to create a Chinese restaurant different from the imaginary, recovering some typical elements of Chinese culture, avoiding clichés.
A place where you can meet Italian and Chinese people eating together and sharing good food.
The image of the restaurant is the typical way of eating the Chinese: outside their homes, sitting on baskets and lights hanging from the trees, is the attempt to introduce this moment of sociality in Milan.
The concept is to maintain a continuity between inside and outside so that people are encouraged to enter: creating a single room (before it was divided by a central wall) visible from the outside through the windows, which creates an internal square, surrounded from homes, as the volume of the bath conceived with the shape of a house.
And 'as if he had come here by chance, as the market and you decide to stop eating fresh food sitting on what you find in the street.
The white color is used to smooth and brighten the environment than other Chinese restaurants, are used to illuminate the space simple light bulbs of various sizes hung with strings of colored cord.
The room has three areas: one on the left near the windows with two rows of tables, a more intimate way with a long bench, separated by a low wall and another to the right with a single large table.
As for the furniture: tables are made of plywood, the chairs replaced with stools, a typical way of eating Asian (without backrest), made of plywood with a hole in the middle to give way to colorful baskets, conceived as containers for customers;
Finally, the wall built with bricks exposed concrete thought of as scenic space for bottles of wine.
The materials used in the project are simple and inexpensive construction materials but revisited in a new functional and aesthetic.