Terra Restaurant. Texture panoramas in the YOD Group project

Architect
YOD Group
A type
a restaurant
Status
implemented
Year
2022
Size
1152 sq. M.

This year, the Terra restaurant opened in the new Emily Resort complex in the town of Vinnyki, Lviv region. Its project was developed by YOD Group designers. The restaurant has a spacious room, zoned with textured columns, and a large open terrace. But what is more important than any technical or zonal specifics — it has in its interiors a unique atmosphere of Ukrainian landscapes, expressed through unique textures and characteristic colors.

Rhythm of images

«When creating the interior concept, we sought to extract colors, textures and images from the surrounding landscape to translate them into a design language. It's like the Eyedropper tool in Photoshop, but on a real-life scale", YOD Group notes.

Indeed, as soon as you enter the establishment, you see the same landscape shades in the interiors: deep green, terracotta clay, earth and beige reed shoots. There is no literalness in the reflection of the intended image. Every detail is meaningful and embodied in generalized, yet recognizable elements of modern design.

The main room of the restaurant is spacious, but endowed with a clear vertical rhythm. It is set by spectacular round decorated columns - one can say that this is one of the main elements that accentuates the design project and the visual idea embedded in it.

From the outside, the columns are covered with grass-colored glass bricks. They were custom made by Italian glass brand Poesia Glass, and each brick has a slight radius bend to create a perfectly rounded shape. The lighting systems installed inside each of the glass columns distinctly highlight the texture of the transparent brick and make it possible to see how, in this light, the seemingly monotonous green wins with gradient colors. It is difficult not to stop looking at the shimmering, deep surface of these columns, not to touch it to make sure if it is suddenly not a real rippling of pond water, which for some reason refused to obey gravity and flowed upwards.

A wine room is hidden inside the column with the largest diameter. Bottles are arranged along a rounded wall, and a spiral staircase stretches up along them - from popular and more affordable brands to top collectible varieties. According to the designers, the room is designed for 3500 bottles. The total weight of the wine room is more than 20 tons, the height is 6 meters.

The restaurant hall also has columns decorated with mini-format terracotta tiles. Functionally, they serve as stations for waiters. Visually, they not only complement the grassy color of the glass textures on other columns, but also refer to the local tradition of decorating stoves and fireplaces with ceramic tiles. Like the glass bricks from Poesia Glass, they were custom made and also have a slight radius bend. The tiles for the project were ordered from a local ceramic workshop.

I will go to distant mountains, to wide plains

Another focal location in the Terra design project — a wall in the depth of the main hall. Its surface is covered with copper-colored glass plates. Some of them have a unique floral print - imprints of local plants. Each drawing, each shape is special, just as each Ukrainian landscape is unique. All plates are mounted in a dynamic structure, which allows you to change the position of the elements at different angles, creating and transforming different textural compositions — either abstract-geometric, or surprisingly similar to the mountain panoramas of western Ukraine.

In total, the entire structure has two thousand copper plates. According to the YOD Group designers, they conceived this wall as a metaphor for a reed that was once blown by the wind. Changing patterns will not only add variety to the interior, but will also involve the guests themselves in the interaction.

When choosing the plant filling for the restaurant, the designers preferred the dryness of reed panicles instead of bright living greenery.

The general palette of the hall contains many earthy shades — from the darkest, somewhat similar to the color of black earth, to light beige and ash gray. Wood, ceramics, water shimmering of glass, flooded with light through panoramic windows and supplemented with interior lighting, every detail and texture of the restaurant seems to invite you on a tour of the Ukrainian slopes and meadows. The institution is not just located close to nature, it merges with it and mimics it - however, it does not lose its man-made uniqueness.

An open, spacious terrace adjoins the hall. The designers did not want to demarcate these spaces, so the transition from one to the other is as barrier-free as possible — both physically and visually. The rhythmic wall with copper-plated plates through the panoramic window continues with the same textured partition, but with a different pattern. Gray and beige shades of the interior are beginning to win in a new way against the background of natural landscapes instead of interior compositions. Trees grow right on the terrace, under each of them a personal "porthole" was carved in the roof - for growth.

«We sought to create a soft flow between the interior and exterior space. To immerse guests in a sense of harmony with nature and inner peace", the designers share their vision of the terrace.

Is it minimalism? Not that at all. Are these some ethnic motives? Perhaps in certain manifestations, but again, not quite them. The Terra Restaurant project is so original that only the author himself can give a correct definition of its images and textural interweaving. Here is what the founder of YOD Group, Volodymyr Nepiyvoda, says about it:We borrowed a term from winemaking and called this approach «terroir design». Just as wine concentrates the characteristics of the region where the vine grew, our project reflects the local character of the place where the establishment is located».

 

Text: Daryna Karapetyan

Photo: Evgeny Avramenko