Pizza Farro

A pizzeria in Melbourne’s inner north looks to the recent past to create future nostalgia.

That the word “gentrification” is so often inflected with a pejorative sneer is more a reflection on its association with real estate agents and heritage-themed paint swatches than on the process itself. After all, as local demographics evolve and people from different backgrounds interact, new communities are formed from rich layers of local and imported experience, history, culture and tradition. Thornbury, a suburb in Melbourne’s inner north, is one such community – a classic Aussie palimpsest of twentieth-century European immigration, Kingswood-era working-class suburbia, intermittent light industry and, yes, twenty-first-century middle-class property speculation. In amongst all of this, Pizza Farro – designed by co-owner and former landscape architect Yvette Romanin – is a wonderful microcosm of the surrounding neighbourhood.

Romanin and her partner Vince Lotito relocated the restaurant from Carlton three years ago, prompting flushes of deja vu for long-time locals – the building was for many years one of Thornbury’s most notorious pizza bars, Don Ciccio’s. Even for newcomers unfamiliar with the backstory, the street awning and brown-brick facade are instantly recognizable as old-school pizzeria. That these features have been retained gives the first clues to the reverence for history and lived experience that underpins Romanin’s design.

Programmatically, the restaurant is relatively straightforward: a cafe-sized front room leads through an archway (another remnant of the building’s 1970s brown-brick past) into a larger dining room with an open kitchen at the rear. Visually, however, it’s a delight. In the front room, bright green watering cans that double as light fittings hang from the ceiling; other vintage garden items – wheelbarrow wheels, for example – are similarly suspended; and the wall opposite the service counter is dressed with panels of elegant monochrome wallpaper created by Romanin from fin de siècle botanical illustrations of fruit and vegetables. The effect is playful but also very cool; with the gabled roof above, it’s equal parts stylized garden shed and inner-city cafe.

In the main dining room, the walls have been stripped back to bare brick, and display the scars of countless renovations and patch-up jobs like the rings of an old eucalypt recording bushfires and drought. They are adorned with curtains made from souvenir tea towels and vintage fabrics. But again it is the ceiling that demands the most attention: over four hundred unique wooden rolling pins hang in rows from the rafters. Ceiling lights directed onto the pins throw a warm timber-toned glow over the tables below. Together, the two rooms represent the two hubs of inner-urban self-sufficiency and two key elements of Romanin’s childhood: the productive backyard, with its fruit trees, vegie patch and chooks, and the domestic kitchen, where all that fresh produce was baked into cakes, turned into jam and sprinkled onto pizzas. It’s a simple idea deftly executed and it scores a direct hit on the collective nostalgia of Melbourne’s inner north.

Yet Romanin’s restaurant interior is as much about the future as it is about the past. From all of the historical layers – the Carlton origins, Don Ciccio’s, the found objects, the representations of garden and kitchen – Pizza Farro is creating a fresh layer of experience for a new generation of born-and-bred Thornbury locals. On any given night, the seats adjacent to the kitchen are occupied by eager kids with noses pressed up against the chefs’ glass splashback, watching pizza bases being rolled, tossed, covered with toppings and shovelled into the oven. Looking at the transfixed young faces, you can almost see the memories crystallizing in whichever part of the brain stores fuel for future nostalgia. By the time these kids are adults, Thornbury will probably be a different place again, but it’s a fair bet that these happy memories will remain.

Credits

Project
Pizza Farro
Design practice
Yvette Romanin
Consultants
Builder Vince Lotito and Yvette Romanin
Site Details
Location Thornbury,  Melbourne,  Vic,  Australia
Project Details
Status Built
Category Hospitality, Interiors

Source

Project

Published online: 1 Mar 2010
Words: Mark Scruby
Images: Sonia Mangiapane

Issue

Artichoke, March 2010

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