Spring Restaurant
Spring Restaurant
Spring is an extraordinary restaurant fit-out in London’s Somerset House, which has re-calibrated the city’s dining experience. “London restaurants have a tendency towards the masculine and right from the outset this was to be light, feminine and uplifting’, says Briony. Alongside the client, her sister chef Syke Gyngell, she undertook the refurbishment of two massive gloomy rooms, previously tax offices, within the grandeur of a late 18th century Neoclassical building in London’s Strand.
Briony started with a piece of Moroccan cloth that for her embodied the entire colour palette for the interior. “Miraculously it was all there in the weave – the pale blues, the pink, the natural sandy colours and the bronze. I had my starting point’, she says.
Early choices were the iconic tan leather Mario Bellini Cab dining chairs and clusters of frosted globe pendant lights which created the illusion of lowering the 4-metre high ceilings while maintaining a sense of airiness.
Walls lined in the palest blue grass cloth add texture and provide a backdrop to the fragile ceramic artwork by Valeria Nascimento while a significant commission from Australian Emma Peascod a talent in the art of reverse glass painting, hangs above the bar.
Working within heritage restrictions timber was repaired and reinstalled, coloured, waxed plaster applied to walls and the extensive joinery needed to house everything from client’s coats to high chairs, was designed.
“Skye backed me all the way and I have to say the collaboration shows”, says Briony
