Furniture — seats, tables, stools and those things that rattle when you shake the box — is another design element whose essential features articulate a design concept. We study the relationship between furniture and the space within which it sits. Dimension, color, texture of finish, physical support, weight and ease of movement are each discrete features of furniture that influence the diner's experience of a space. The bar stool at Le Bernardin whose seat is longer and narrower than typical in deference to the intimacy and casualness of the space, the large swivel stools at Big Bar that make it easy for a group to gather around, the tables at Craft that are longer and wider to accommodate multiple shared plates and the long banquette at The Modern, whose rolled back allows diners to drape an arm over its low crest and comfortably engage those seated in the adjacent room, are each elaborations of our ideas about how these spaces should work. Differences of fractions of an inch in seat height can dramatically change the way a patron engages the table top. Greeter stands, farm tables, wine displays and service stations play a similar role in informing character and supporting a design concept (Figure 17). In our work, art pieces, whether flat or three-dimensional, moving or stationary, are integral to the design concept. Consider the Thomas Demand photograph at The Modern, the Stephen Hannock paintings at Craft and Eleven Madison Park, the Per Fronth glass print at Rouge Tomate, the Ran Ortner painting at Le Bernardin, the Robert Kushner painting at Gramercy Tavern and Kushner's mosaic at Tabla. In each case, the artwork is not present as a decorative object but as a part of the space, one of its many features, augmenting the restaurant's concept through its narrative and reinforcing the architectural content by affirming its territory and interconnections. In these ways, with these instruments and this vision, we compose our spaces, linking disparate scales, rationalizing the relationships between distinct uses while accommodating their individual requirements, resolving formal and material intersections, orchestrating the palette in ways that enhance the sense of place as well as the physical comfort of those who use and experience these restaurants. As architects we embrace the differences of program and character and make that difference a subject of design. We commit ourselves to action followed by reflection and action again, a process and method through which we seek a refined and thorough result that fulfills the promise that we envision for architecture generally and, more specifically, for the architecture of restaurants.
Figure 16A: Cielo: Sketch of illuminated wine rack
Figure 16B: Cielo, wine rack
Figure 17: Toku: Details of furniture
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