How Hollywood set designers are now giving restaurants their ‘wow’ factor
‘Story focused’ workers on Wes Anderson films and ‘Hamilton’ stage show in demand as restaurateurs aim to transform look – and fortunes – of businesses
Set designer Kris Moran had five months to source props for Wes Anderson’s 2001 comedy drama film The Royal Tenenbaums – which starred Gene Hackman, Bill Murray, Gwyneth Paltrow and Ben Stiller – including three to prepare things.
“When you’re on set, [during] filming, it runs [at] around US$200,000 per day,” Moran says. “You have to be prepared or everything stops.”
And for the interiors of the Bombay Bread Bar restaurant? One week.
The Bombay Bread Bar is the new incarnation of Indian restaurant Paowalla in New York’s SoHo and is the most recent example of a thoroughly modern restaurant tailor-made for the Instagram generation.
When merely turning up the lights won’t do, restaurateurs are enlisting experts from stage and screen to make dining spaces that double as photogenic lifestyle moments.
Fashion haunts such as Ralph Lauren’s Polo Bar, which has locations in New York, Chicago, and Paris and was co-designed by Lauren, have known this for years, but the trend has gone Hollywood.
At the Bombay Bread Bar, what was once a buttoned-up, monochromatic space is now a vibrant, colourful room, with a giant tiger mural animating the bread oven and a curtain of yellow flowers at the door.