RED Pif Restaurant & Wine Shop by Aulik Fiser Architekti // Prague.

Few things in life excite me more than seeing architects and designers thinking about places they design – taking their time to distill the essence of their client, the context, the purpose of the space etc, before setting out to package all of their thinking into a beautiful, elegant and cohesive interior. And not the other way around. I truly believe these types of spaces have the ability to move people, or at least make them feel something, even if those people may not be massive design tragics such as myself. These interiors simply feel right, make sense, and people want to spend time in them. In other words – they are the shit!

Enter RED Pif. This Restaurant and Wine Shop is located in Prague, and it was designed by Czech studio Aulík Fišer Architekti. The project recognises traditional values of wine industry where the architects have drawn key parallels between the authenticity in design and wine-making. Just like a good wine, this interior is devoid of any “artificial flavour”. In fact, the statement from the architects is just too good that I didn’t have the heart to edit it, so I am going to include it below if you feel like reading. It’s gold!

“When the client approached us with an offer to design this interior I asked myself a question whether I could at all accept such a task. Should we linger upon it though I do not understand the atmosphere of cool restaurants at all? Disliking their shallow visuality, not understanding the purpose why they are furnished with objects from among the most up-to-date design series used as a means to become authentic – this is no singularity at all! I communicated these doubts including (in my opinion) poor examples in this sense to the client at our every first meeting.

We browsed through photographs of bars and small wine shops in France he brought me. As a source of inspiration, he said (though on the contrary to the thesis on modern restaurant). All of them spontaneously furnished rooms with the atmosphere given by the place and all those years their owners have been running them. I objected that only life could do this. Of course – la vie en France, life in France. And that this cannot be designed because it would be like artificial flavouring of wine – and would you drink artificially flavoured wines?

I do not know now who of us used the term first, but it became the starting point of all our further reasoning – we agreed not to artificially flavour even the interior. It would contravene the character of natural wines they should sell in the wine shop…” Jakub Fišer/ Petra Skalická – Aulík Fišer architekti.

[Photography by AI Photography. Found via Dezeen.]