SUMMARY
Atmos were commissioned to design and deliver the exuberant centrepiece staircase that weaves between the 3 levels of experience at HIDE (bar BELOW; informal a-la-carte dining at GROUND; elegant tasting menu ABOVE).
The stair’s design creates a plant-like structure that grows like an irrepressible life-force from beneath, bursting from the shadows of the basement towards the daylight above. It twists upwards, spiralling energetically like a corkscrew, steps unfurling seamlessly from the structural stem like leaves, while further branches similarly delaminate to form a delicate wavy balustrade guiding the guests carefully upwards. “StairStalk” finally unfurls at the 1st floor level, as if reuniting with its vast family of arboreal brethren in Green Park opposite - nestling just beyond the full-height panoramic glazing fronting Piccadilly. Like a wild plant pulsing insistently upwards and outwards between the comparatively restrained geometry of its surrounding architecture, it at last comes to rest once its conveyancing role is accomplished, merging gently into the walls that contain it.
NATURE
Its entire surface is made of European Oak, like a green plant grown woody with age, thus naturalising amidst the restaurant’s family of wider oak furniture.The main structure was layered from glued slices of thin oak veneer, laid and laminated together against curved moulds and then hand-sanded into shape to form an elaborately-curving timber structure whose visible grain magically follows its path.
This structure then encapsulates the thicker slabs of more familiar wide- oak floorboards forming the upper and lower surface of each tread, thus echoing the fields of parallel oak floorboards at the uppermost treads of each flight.The evolving design took its cue from the natural palette, playful imagination, and powerful aesthetic developed by both the interior designer and the project client. This love of nature is further echoed in Ollie Dabbous’s showcasing of natural ingredients; his reinvention of familiar vegetables; even the stunning culinary presentation of delicately curling leaves and petals and other botanicals. Another crucial influence was more mystical and whimsical and relates to the perceived magic that underpins all nature - especially the world of childhood fairy-tales, in whose fertile soils the stair first took root.
GEOMETRY
The stair begins in the basement as a simple concave step, indented to invite the user into its folds, which then curl back to mould into the surrounding fibres of the stringers trammelling it either side as they travel along the enclosing walls either side. From there the central indent flips to become an increasingly protruding curve whose sequence aggregates to imply a central speedier ridge that the speedier guests can quickly ascend, while the remaining indented valleys either side offer calmer, slower journeys.
The stair glides along a glazed bar wall to its left, glowing with the amber glow of sophisticate alcohols, until this cedes at the spiral’s centre to a circular glass-domed beer-hop rummager, specially commissioned as a hand-turned cast-iron set of cogs that reference the distilling process - and enable the barman to rotate and access the bottles within. On its other side, the wall flanking the hidden lift undulated and protruded to magnetically inflect the stair geometry, just as both ceiling edges meeting the stair also undulated to respectfully meet it.
StairStalk then lifts free of the bar wall below and its inner stringer ascends as a free-floating structural element, bearing the full weight of the entire stair structure until it docks with the mezzanine floor above. The structure is larger and grander than it might first appear – 5 full metres in diameter, with a metre-wide void free of structure. The inner balustrade split where it hits the ground level to form a fibrous offshoot that encircles the stair void, bifurcating to continue upwards as the main stair stem, but also unwrapping to form the front nosing of the tread just one step up, which in turn further bifurcates to not only wrap around the edge of this 1st floating tread (eventually blending back into the stringer from which it sprung, its fibres morphing perfectly with the ridges of its underside), but also then rising as a robust thick strand which eventually forms the outer handrail, gliding upwards before wrapping around the wall towards the lift.
The tread geometries were assembled from pure arcs, conjoined tangentially and seamlessly at their tips, for simplicity of transcribing drawings into fabricated elements. Simple composite arcs facilitated quicker transliteration of geometry into built matter. No two lines repeat; no treads are the same; each step contributes its unique part to an ever-evolving algorithmic sequence.
WIDER CONTEXT
Atmos were commissioned to contribute to a project that was already highly developed and atmospheric by the time they came on board. They designed a project that grew with its neighbours, nestling and interacting with them. The stair germinates in the bar, where its tendrils flow out from niches in the wall; junctions between floor and wall; bar footrails, and even the magnificent slabs of burr wood from the bartop, which they appear to momentarily tame as they then bunch into fibres that thrust upwards.
Rose Murray, founder of These White Walls (the concept and interior designer for the wider restaurant), describes how the restaurant centres on “the theme of Dwelling”, and how “the dual narratives of the Hide-as-Home and the Hide-as-Hidden have been intertwined spatially throughout the interior; [how] the interior scheme is a re-imagining of the familiar.” Much of her work entailed innovative commissioning of artists to create new spatial works for the design of the interior, infusing it with added cultural depth. Lustedgreen were responsible for the architectural design, detailing and co-ordinating all aspects of the project and worked closely with the Concept and Interior Designer, These White Walls, developing the design scheme.
Atmos’s contribution is partly a simple staircase – a means to move upwards from A to Z – but partly also its complete reinvention, with all components magically merging; verticals melting into horizontals; a handrail swooping downwards and deforming to suddenly become the sole thing supporting you beneath your feet; the entirety an opportunity to explore new ways of physically inhabiting space.
The stair celebrates movement, energy, and a kind of graceful restlessness – a companion piece to what Murray describes as the wider restaurant’s “whole new expression of inhabited space, where the uncanny of the everyday that surrounds us is continually revealed.”
DRAWINGS: http://bit.ly/StairStalkDrawings
RENDERS: http://bit.ly/StairStalkRenders
ANIMATIONS: http://bit.ly/StairStalkAnimations
PROJECT TEAM:
Design: atmos (Aditya Bhatt, Alex Haw, Matthew Martensen + Adeline Chum, Afsana Begum, Anamaria Popa, Christian Erl, Chrysanthi Bekta, Claudiu Popa, Justin Jones, Laura Vitzthum, Natalie Chelliah)
Fabrication: Trąbczyński / GD Staircases (Mikolaj Trąbczyński, Szymon Trąbczyński, Wojtek Stafiniak, Janusz Kosciuch)
Structural Engineering: Heyne Tillett Steel (Kelly Harrison, Tom Jarman, Andy Heyne)
Client: HIDE (Evgeny Chichvarkin, Tatiana Fokina)
Concept & Interior Design: These White Walls (Rose Murray + Flo Barrios)
Architectural Design & Detailing: Lusted Green (Nigel Green, Thomas Kroenig, Samantha Ryding, Ashley Wilson)
Project Management: Fraser Randall (Brian Brockwell, Emily Fraser, Lee Starling, Nick Underwood, Richard Ainsworth)
