Project: Daria Restaurant
Architects: ZOOCO Estudio
Location: Santander, Spain
Year: 2018
Text and photos by ZOOCO Estudio
This place is located in one of the oldest neighborhoods of the city that has hosted several restaurants in its interior over time, but whose walls were some day part of an old fishermen’s market in the area. The various interventions had overlapped a multitude of layers on the existing walls.
The action consists of cleaning the space of coatings, floors, false ceilings, layers of paint and superfluous elements until recovering the original space and returning its essence. Thus, the mixed stone and brick walls, the oak beams and the plaster vaults give to the place its own personality that recovers the natural essence of the space.
On this basis, an element is projected that reorganizes the space, leaving in its lower part the service areas (kitchen, bar and toilets) and in its upper part the dining room that enjoys a double height created. For the construction of this device is used exclusively steel, but in different formats, based the structure on tubes and profiles and the enclosures on a combination of blind sheets and screens according to the needs of each room.
To create a spatial and perceptive continuity of the performance, a latticework of retroilluminated metal chains is overlaid to have a constant and slight balance. This superimposition summarizes the action taken, fusing the metallic element as a representative of the new intervention and the stone face recovered, establishing an interesting material dialogue that highlights the great difference between the two construction stages.
