- Balena
- Balena, designed by Karen Herold, showing where the two buildings meet
Yesterday, in the first part of my interview with restaurant designer Karen Herold of Studio K, she talked about the philosophy that goes into her designs, of how a restaurant works and serves its customers.
When I first saw Balena, I was surprised that there was so much open space in it. Because there’s never that much open space in a restaurant in the city, a two-story main hall like that. How did you get away with that?
Then we extended the facade to the front, so we made it look like it was one larger building and you know it’s all one restaurant. And we did the same in the back—we built a wall in the one building to square it out with the other room, and the room behind that became a private dining room.
- Jason Little/Embeya
- Embeya
So he shared these photos from a research trip they took, and there was one photo in particular that was of an ancient door with green moss on it. And that became the key to it for me, which we made into these walls of plaster with dark green mixed into it. Then it was just a few other design elements, but it’s very simple. I feel like if you took one more thing out of the design, it would no longer be Embeya.
There are cliches, I guess, like wide red leather chairs—
