Refreshments

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1 Jan 1996

This is an article from the Architecture Australia archives and may use outdated formatting

20 Meyers Place, Melbourne, by Six Degrees

20 Meyers Place
Photography by John Gollings

Maisy’s Café
Photography by Ross Honeysett

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Groove on a budget: young architects juggle classic commercial dilemmas in their designs of new caf&eacutes and bars in three cities.

20 Meyers Place

Designed by Six Degrees, architects who are also among the owners, this back-lane bar in central Melbourne is a sophisticated and resourceful composition of scavenged and new materials. Cupboard doors from a Department of Education office building can drop down to form tables, using hinges that were formerly Vic Rails train arm rests. Timber panelling under the concrete counter came from the stagefront of the old Melbourne Town Hall. The aim was to test in Melbourne the successful Asian concept of bars and restaurants opening to the street. At 20 Meyers Place, the glazed front wall can fold entirely open in summer or be closed in winter—and in a decon detail, the counter breaks through this recessed wall of glass. On closing, the premises are shielded by a roller shutter.

Maisy’s Café

In a seventies-to-nineties update that unfortunately didn’t extend to a change of name, Ian Moore and Abbie Galvin have applied cool order to a popular all-hours café at Neutral Bay on Sydney’s north shore. Their facelift uses a palette of battalion-proof materials (hoop pine plywood, stainless steel and yellow 100mm tiles on a dark concrete floor) to define a rational composition of mainly rectilinear volumes and forms. The layout has a rear mezzanine, an upstairs kitchen and a double-height dining space at the front which is visually extended by a mirrored back wall. An enclosed staircase rises to the mezzanine from behind the ground floor bar. Contradicting the 90deg. geometry of the architectural elements are floating furniture items of a curvy nature—client-selected chairs by Euroform, circular tables by Norman and Quaine and custom bar stools with leather seats.

Hotel LA

Schizophrenia has prevailed, perhaps predictably, in the fitout of a historic Brisbane hotel by architects from opposite ends of the country. Kovac Architecture (Melbourne) and Cottee Parker (Brisbane) were both commissioned by nightclub entrepreneur Peter Austin for the $800,000 stage one refurb of Hotel LA (Lord Albert); formerly the Paddington Barracks on the corner of Caxton Street and Petrie Terrace. The strategy was to remove walls and strip to raw brick, then insert curvaceous elements of a kind associated with Tom Kovac’s Melbourne interiors; supplemented by tropical bamboo chairs and bar stools and a white fabric sun canopy wrapping around the courtyard restaurant. It’s not a cohesive look, but the scene’s said to be cool. Photography by Damiano Visocnik

Sushi-Gen

Patchouli-era subtleties are evident in the new design by Mark Cashman and Mike Hanna of a Japanese sushi kitchen and bar on the Victoria Street café strip in Sydney’s Kings Cross. As well as rounded corners to the banquette along one wall, the long counter and the frames of the folding glass doors, the interior is finished in satiny synthetics; vinyl on the floor and banquette, laminate on the counter. Unseen behind a wall of layered timber-veneered tiles is a kitchen which occupies two-thirds of this former doctor’s surgery—it is large enough to produce (by robotic machines) enough sushi for several other outlets proposed by the owners. Stainless tables are permanently fixed; the Aalto stools of course move around.