Zapote Restaurant - Israel Alvarez, Mariana Tello

Módulo11 has designed a new restaurant in a neighbourhood known as “La Roma”, one of the zones with the highest life quality in Mexico City. The design is based on the idea of transforming the existing space into a sprightly restaurant with the ambiance and warmth of a traditional house. Rather than interior design it is architecture inside architecture. A wooden interior envelope, made out of frames that reproduce a traditional house’s silhouette, defines the diners’ area. These wooden frames repetition along the space emerge as a volume that figuratively resembles the interior of a house.

Jaime Navarro. Published on June 20, 2013.

Zapote restaurant is located in a neighbourhood known as “La Roma”, one of the zones with the highest life quality in Mexico City, which burgeoned from a single hardware store. The design’s main challenge consisted on transforming the existing space, cold and humdrum, into a sprightly restaurant with the ambiance and warmth of a traditional house, and a daily place for the people of the neighbourhood and its surroundings. The design process starts with the experimentation of different typologies, looking for a distinctive element that could modify the existent conditions and that the space could be appropriated. Rather than interior design, the project is about a spatial transformation, it is architecture inside architecture. The existing space presents rectangular proportions, with an axis of columns in the middle that splits the area into two dramatically elongated corridors. Therefore the restaurant is defined by having an opened kitchen, situated in one corridor, and the diners’ area in the other.

Jaime Navarro. Published on June 20, 2013.

Both areas, the kitchen and the diners’ area, achieve a unique character that helps on clearly define the spaces within the restaurant and on generating a relationship among them. The kitchen has an industrial aspect with the installations exposed, whereas the diners’ area attains the opposite: hidden installations and a pleasant and warm environment. A wooden interior envelope, made out of frames that reproduce a traditional house’s silhouette, defines the diners’ area. These wooden frames repetition along the space emerge as a volume that figuratively resembles the interior of a house. This interior envelope is modified so that it reacts to the existent conditions of the space: opening itself to the street according to the position of the windows. It is also connected with the diners’ bar by following the main structure and framing the relationship with the kitchen, creating major proximity to it. The transversal character of the wooden frames amends the perception of the space and generates an individual scale.

Jaime Navarro. Published on June 20, 2013.

The interior experience achieved by the physical contact with the wood texture and its shadows becomes an interactive and not only visual. The light, filtered into the interior thru the frames, produces a particular and versatile atmosphere that changes along the day. Both, the external view and the relationship with the street are controlled by the openings on the wood that invite to enter and linger in the space, and at the same time give privacy to the diners inside. One side of the diners’ area is connected to the street across the façade allowing the reading of the house’s silhouette from outside. On the other side, a wall serves as a canvas for diverse artistic installations that will be changing continuously in time to diversify the visitor’s experience.