BEAUTY: Interior Design--Lolita Eipprova Café & Patisserie

Andrej Mercina, director of the Slovenian architectural firm TRIIIJE has created an arresting, immersive project in the town of Ljubljana. In collaboration with visual artist Jaša Mrevlje-Pollak, Lolita Eipprova Café & Patisserie is a hymn to age, texture, recycled materials, and a sense of the hand-drawn and handmade. The team left exposed the masonry walls full of cracks, stains, peeling plastering and chipped corners and added original tiles that were found in the basement of the building along with extra parquet flooring on the walls and mirrors sourced from other construction sites. The team even shopped at flea markets and thrift stores to find vintage plates and tea cups. Dead stock textiles were used for drapery panels and upholstery on minimal banquettes. And vintage bentwood Thonet chairs were sourced in a variety of stains. I really love the heavily plastered and striated walls in the hallway to the cave-like restrooms. But the most beautiful element in the entire project is the wall treatment, looking as if an artist sketched all over with pastels and charcoal, doodling florals, plants, and meaningful phrases in a beautiful natural color palette. The result is like sitting inside a life-sized version of an artist's sketchbook. Just lovely.

https://www.kaval-group.si/lolita-eipprova
https://www.triiije.com/
http://www.jasha.org/

The Madero Café, Guatemala City

Taller KEN, an architecture firm based in New York and Guatemala created a dream-like tropical oasis of a restaurant. Madero Café is a plain burgundy cube on the outside, albeit studded with cars that appear as if they crashed and penetrated part way into the building. But it is the inside that is kaleidoscopic.

The architecture firm says:
"This project mines local patterns, materials and textures and collects them to make a fresh tropical atmosphere.

The café is open-air, with no glass, to connect the project to the pedestrian walkways. The exterior consists only of custom operable folding shutters comprised of steel panels inter-woven with dowels. It ‘skins’ the existing commercial center’s facade to create a greater impression of a unified whole when seen from all 3 free sides.

The floor is a custom-made concrete tile with a ‘random’ colorful pattern that serves as an orienting guide for people to circulate around the service core of kitchen and bathrooms and explore to find unique surprises and moments to experience the project differently each visit."

The café is sustainably minded too--the space is lit by sawtooth skylights and rain water is collected in the gigantic blue barrels you see against one wall to maintain all of the tropical planting.

http://www.tallerken.info/projectsaul-bistro-majadas-1

Bar Luce In Milan Designed By Wes Anderson

The Fondazione Prada, an offshoot of the Italian luxury brand, just opened a new "cultural complex" in Milan. The Foundation's Mission Statement:
"For the last two decades, the Fondazione Prada’s activities have analyzed intentions and relevance through an evolution of projects. These have included ‘Utopian’ monographic artist commissions, contemporary philosophy conferences, research exhibitions and initiatives related to the field of cinema. With the opening of a permanent cultural complex in Milano, the Fondazione offers new opportunities to enlarge and enrich our processes of learning."

Adjacent to the Foundation's new space is Bar Luce, a café/restaurant whose interior design was commissioned from acclaimed filmmaker Wes Anderson. As expected, Bar Luce reflects the director's sensibilities with retro grey Formica countertops, sea foam green booths with padding in colors of pink icing and pistachio green, and a 1950s style terrazzo floor. And I LOVE that there is a "Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou" pinball machine!

The Bar Luce website describes it best:
"Designed by film director Wes Anderson, Bar Luce recreates the atmosphere of a typical Milanese cafè. Although his movies often favor symmetrical tableaux, Anderson feels that ‘there is no ideal angle for this space. It is for real life, and ought to have numerous good spots for eating, drinking, talking, reading, etc. While I do think it would make a pretty good movie set, I think it would be an even better place to write a movie. I tried to make it a bar I would want to spend my own non-fictional afternoons in.’

Some architectural and decorative details from the original structure have been preserved, such as the arched ceiling, which recreates a ‘miniature’ version of the vaulted glass roof of the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, one of Milan’s symbolic buildings. Other key elements of the Galleria are replicated inside, creating a sort of patterned decoration for the top half of the bar.
In keeping with the interior design, the seats, formica furniture, floor, veneered wood wall panels and the range of colors employed are reminiscent of Italian popular culture and aesthetics from the 1950s and 1960s, echoing artistic decisions Anderson made years earlier for his short film ‘Castello Cavalcanti’. Other iconographic sources have been equally inspirational, notably two masterpieces of Italian Neorealism, both set in Milan: ‘Miracolo a Milano’ (Miracle in Milan, 1951, Vittorio De Sica) and ‘Rocco e i suoi fratelli’ (Rocco and His Brothers, 1960, Luchino Visconti).

The bar can be accessed directly from Via Orobia, and is meant to be a hotspot for the general public, as well as a regular neighborhood hangout.

Bar Luce is open daily, from 9AM to 10PM."

If you find yourself in Milan, drop in and tell us about it!

http://www.fondazioneprada.org/barluce-en/?lang=en