Per Cent’Anni: Pattern Studio’s Restaurant Built for a Hundred Years of Happiness.

Good design belongs everywhere — and few projects make the case quite so persuasively as Moby’s Whale Beach. The latest hospitality project by Pattern Studio sits inside one of the Northern Beaches’ most beloved cultural institutions, the Whale Beach Surf Life Saving Club, and rewrites what an SLSC restaurant can be. It’s the kind of place that elevates without intimidating, that’s special without being precious — design pitched for the nonna at Sunday lunch, the wedding party at sundown, and the teenager waiting out a southerly, all at once.

If you’ve been around Yellowtrace for any length of time, you’ll know Pattern Studio sits firmly in my personal pantheon of favourite Australian practices. Since their first feature on the site back in 2018, Lily Goodwin and Josh Cain have produced some of the most considered hospitality and retail interiors in the country. Moby’s — their second collaboration with Brett Conway’s Merci Group, following Dunes in Palm Beach and Suki (formerly Rosa) in Mona Vale — might just be their sharpest project yet.

Inside Marlowe, J.AR OFFICE Lets a Heritage Brisbane Building Do the Talking.

Jared Webb has a particular kind of creative intelligence that's hard to articulate—the sort that pulls together unrelated genres, eras and references into something that transcends the sum of its parts. Something we now lazily shorthand as a 'vibe'.

The site arrives with significant cultural weight. Whale Beach SLSC was established in 1937, with its current built form dating largely to a 1953 expansion. As Pattern’s co-founders write in their project statement: “Surf Life Saving Clubs, while undoubtedly a community staple in our ocean-obsessed culture, are not always synonymous with design excellence.” That dissonance became the brief’s animating tension.

Merci Group secured a 20-year lease, well beyond the typical 5+5 cycle, which pushed the design conversation onto a much longer horizon. Pattern’s response leaned into a marriage metaphor — fitting, given the venue’s wedding speciality. As they put it: “We sought longevity; for the design response to mirror the qualities of a good marriage. Timeless, but not boring. Longstanding, without losing its spark.” The next translation challenge was tonal: an Italian theme inside a distinctly Australian setting, delivered with enough freshness to escape the gravitational pull of every other modern Italian restaurant.

Upstairs, the 60-seat Moby’s restaurant takes its material cues from Italian dolci. Glossy caramel ceilings meet custard-cream walls. Butter-soft leather banquettes the shade of a perfectly cooked cannoli line the room. Espresso-toned timber joinery brings depth, while crisp stainless steel — including USM shelving at the bar — cuts through the richness. A jammy red bar lands like a hit of sweetness, and a custom tiled floor mixing scale, format, and marble varietal nods quietly to the exquisite patterned floors found across Italy.

Decorative lighting earns its keep. The cast is predominantly vintage Italian — a Lamp Elettra Murano Glass by Gramigna for Artemide at the host stand, a Sciolari Brutalist Cubic Chandelier over the round dining tables, a Murano Giogali Sconce by Angelo Mangiarotti for Vistosi anchoring the rear wall — punctuating the rectilinear rhythm of the room and acting as natural wayfinding cues. Thonet’s Melnikov bentwood chair and Jean Prouvé’s 1942 Tabouret Haut from Vitra round out the furniture story with the kind of “if it ain’t broke” classicism the room deserves.

Helsinki's Boreal Restaurant Channels Finnish Forests Through Timber, Art and Kombucha.

Channeling Finland's northern forests, the space wraps an open kitchen in timber framing, walls filled with Scandinavian art, and pendant lights made from kombucha by the restaurant team.

Downstairs, the event space pulls a quieter punch. Floor-to-ceiling curtains frame a dramatic ocean reveal, while a newly installed crazy paving stone floor carves out an alfresco zone at the façade. Existing timber floors were retained and refreshed. The bar — clad in cork and timber strapping, with a double bullnose edge that’s lovely under the hand — is what Pattern affectionately describe as “a handsomely-dressed helper”. Glossy cream-coloured tiles line the back bar, catching the light at certain angles in a way the studio calls “quietly romantic”. The whole room is calibrated to complement rather than upstage the celebration at its centre.

Moby’s Whale Beach is precisely the kind of work that proves a long-held belief of mine: good design is for everyone, and it belongs absolutely everywhere. The sort of place you’d happily take your grandmother — or the uncle who ‘doesn’t really care about design’ but knows, instantly, when he’s somewhere special. The most enduring restaurants are made of this stuff.

Pattern’s closing words capture the spirit better than any paraphrase: “We hope this project is emblematic of design becoming embedded within more aspects of Australian culture, beyond the upper echelons of the inner city,” Lily and Josh reflect. “We believe good design benefits everyone; surfers, brides, nonnas, all of us. We toast to true and everlasting love, and to thoughtful, enduring design. Cin cin.”

Per cent’anni indeed.

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

This restaurant in Bratislava doesn't try to look Italian—it tries to feel Italian. Alan Prekop's concept inverts the spatial logic, transforming the dining room into an imagined terrace in the narrow streets of a historic Italian city.

[Images courtesy of Pattern Studio. Photography by Tom Ross.]