click on thumbnails to enlarge:

click on thumbnails to view:

frond restaurant and cafe

The brief for 'Frond' was to create a restaurant to take New Zealand into the new millennium. I decided that instead of taking the obvious path of high tech, futuristic type design, I would try to create a space that utilised New Zealand's great natural beauty. For me, one of the most prominent symbols of New Zealand is the fern frond, or 'koru'. This is the origin of both the restaurant's name and the dominant shape throughout.

I decided to split the space into three separate areas - a casual cafe downstairs, a lounge area and dance floor on the mezzanine and a more formal restaurant on the top floor. In the cafe area, I have used booth style seating. The booths are giant aluminium korus, shaped to form an enclosure over and around the seating area. The giant korus, as well as giant fern shapes, are distributed around the ground floor. The floor surface on the ground floor is coated in leaves and varnished so the overall effect is that of being in a dense forest.

The mezzanine area is a transitional space. While still dark and forest-like, it is much roomier than the cafe area, and can be used as a dance floor. There is also a lounge area on the mezzanine.

Upstairs, in the formal dining area, is a more contemporary space. It is a lot lighter, with an enourmous window overlooking the street below, and a glass ceiling.

Look at Frond

To view the design, you can either click on any of the thumbnails to the left to see still images, or any of the thumbnails to the right to see a QuickTime Virtual Reality scene. To navigate through the scenes, you can either use the arrow keys or hold down the left mouse button. To zoom in press 'Shift' and to zoom out press 'Ctrl'. To move forward to another part of the scene, drag the mouse pointer until it turns into an arrow and press the left mouse button.

These scenes are roughly 1 MB in size so they may take a minute to download - but it's worth the wait. Both the still images and the QTVRs were modelled using ArchiCAD 6.0 and rendered in Art*Lantis 3.5

Frond | Viking | Bedford Row

Interior | Furniture | Web | Info | Contact

© tomDESIGN 2000