Personal Space

For chef, Nathan (‘Nate’) Green, Rhoda is a highly personal project. The British chef ran contemporary tapas joint 22 Ships for two years before Yenn Wong, CEO and founder of JIA Group, entrusted him with his own restaurant in Hong Kong’s Sai Ying Pun – a place where he could let his passions roam free. And these passions don’t just come through in the food, they also come through in the design, which was conceived and executed by Joyce Design Wang Studio.

“One of the biggest influences on the design was Nate’s cooking and the way he works with food,” says Joyce Wang, the studio’s principal designer and founder. “He’s working with a barbecue and he uses a very Japanese aesthetic when it comes to plating the dishes.”

The materials in particular reflect Green’s cooking style: charred cedar cladding – created using an ancient Japanese technique called ‘shou sugi ban’ – calls to mind the charcoal grill he cooks on. “The same goes for the style of chair we used; we created this Japanesestyle silhouette,” says Wang.

The materials also represent Green’s own interests and obsessions that further fuel his culinary endevours. Copper elements – the aged copper cladding on the bar, the copper light fixtures and copper surfaces – reference his passion for restoring vintage cars. The lightbox, which hangs suspended from the ceiling of the private dining and drinking area showcase vintage tattoo flash art, embodying Green’s love of tattoos. Called the Barber Room, this room is a tribute to Green himself. “He used to have a big beard, so I wanted to make the room feel hairy,” says Wang. To give the space that hairy feeling, Wang and her team designed an installation of shaving brushes on one wall, and they pushed chicken wire through concrete, giving the walls here a raised, beardy texture. This technique certainly had the desired effect, and it was a neat solution to a key obstacle the team faced: budget.

“I have to make sure our restaurants are financially viable,” says Yenn Wong, who is the force behind F&B pundits JIA Group. “Construction is getting so expensive in Hong Kong, which makes it hard when you’re trying to build details into a space.”

Wang and her team rose to the challenge, though. “The budget pushed us to design in very creative ways. With the texture on the wall in the Barber Room, we knew we couldn’t go for very luxury finishes, so we had to find a way around this,” says the designer, who also worked with plenty of recycled elements. The washing drums hanging from the ceiling are one example. These now function as vast, dramatic lanterns that add to the visual feast.

That’s not to say that Rhoda is in any way overdone – it’s not. Wang has a knack for creating sensory experiences that hit just the right note. And that is exactly what she’s done here: through copper, brick and wood, and through texture and clever details, she and her team have designed a restaurant and bar that perfectly embodies Chef Nate’s personal brand and the delicate philosophy of Rhoda.

The future of hospitality is multi-sensory: touch, taste, smell, sound and so on.

How then are we personifying our clients in the design of their spaces, and how can we pull this off without being gimmicky? A new Hong Kong restaurant and bar by Joyce Wang Design Studio takes a different approach, encapsulating

the chef’s character and culinary style in the space itself.