Alan Prekop Turns a Bratislava Heritage Space Into an Imagined Italian Terrace.

What do you get when a Bratislava designer decides to smuggle a fragment of Italy into a heritage building in the Slovak capital? Something pretty special, as it turns out.

Olis is a new Italian restaurant in Bratislava, designed by local architect and interior designer Alan Prekop—the creative force behind a string of quietly compelling projects in this city. His conceptual premise here is elegant and a little audacious: rather than dressing the interior to look Italian, he inverted the spatial logic entirely. The interior becomes an exterior. Diners aren’t so much seated inside a restaurant as they are perched on an imagined Italian terrace—somewhere in the narrow streets of Naples or Bologna, where public life and private ease blur effortlessly into each other.

Alan Prekop Archives.

See more projects by the Bratislava-based designer previously published on Yellowtrace.

The space was stripped right back to its bones. Exposed brickwork and raw structural elements—revealed after removing layers of previous fit-outs—form the backdrop, functioning not as decoration but as the memory of the building itself. It’s a distinction worth making: this isn’t the affected rawness of a predictable industrial fit-out. The materiality here is quieter and more considered, a counterpoint to the lightness of everything layered on top.

And that layering is where Prekop’s hand really shows. Blue-and-white striped awnings—suspended from six slender stainless-steel rods within the window openings—do the conceptual heavy lifting. Visually, they dissolve the sense of enclosure and introduce a play of light and shadow that reads unmistakably as exterior. The effect is reinforced by festoon light garlands strung overhead, casting the kind of soft, diffused glow that makes even a midweek Tuesday feel like a long summer evening somewhere far from home.

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The furnishings are deliberately, almost provocatively, unpretentious—white plastic garden chairs and verde granite tabletops sit together in a way that’s more Italian beach club than fine dining, which is entirely the point. A pizza counter clad in stacked San Marzano tomato cans and a mosaic-tiled wood-fired oven completes the picture with the right amount of wit and warmth.

For Bratislava, Olis feels like a small cultural intervention as much as a hospitality project—an interior that doesn’t try to be anywhere other than exactly what it is.

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[Images courtesy of Alan Prekop. Photography by Nora Šaparová.]