The Silver Birch restaurant is located in West London where it welcomes diners with locally sourced, seasonal menus within a neighbourhood hub environment, from morning-to-night.
Inspired by the leafy, dappled Chiswick High Road, interior designers B3 created a natural, earthy interior scheme for the new independent restaurant. To enrich the warm and welcoming atmosphere they were creating, B3 approached Foundry to design a lighting scheme for the restaurant space.
Foundry have delivered this using a holistic and encompassing lighting design. Making first impressions count, spotlights produce gentle, rhythmic scallops of light across the timber façade to welcome visitors upon arrival and softly graze the restaurant signage.
At the entrance, inviting warm pools of light are provided by pinhole recessed downlights, guiding guests into the restaurant. The low glare downlights are positioned within an acoustic “birds-nest” fibrous ceiling, divided into panels across the space.
Downlights continue throughout the restaurant, delivering functional light to all the tables. For scene-setting, the downlights are controllable to match the time of day, for example, dimmed to create a more romantic evening setting.
Discreet integral linear light within a raw metal bar gantry offers an amber glow to bottles and glassware, which adds warmth to the simplistic display.
Central to the scheme is a large bespoke multi-arm, feature chandelier suspended over the Chef’s Table. The effect is an organic glow with an exciting view into the kitchen space via Crittal windows.
Foundry have used bespoke wall mounted decorative lights, cantilevered off the restaurant’s sidewall, focusing light directly onto tables and seating zones and adding warm splashes of backlight along the walls for an ambient glow.
Coordinating bespoke pendants are suspended above the curved wooden banquette near the kitchen, hanging over the existing skylight, balancing illumination. Scalloping downlights along the back walls, adjacent to the banquette seating, direct light towards a decorative spoon feature, producing soft textures and shadowing.
For a consistent approach, the lighting tone and hue extend to the kitchen’s functional task lighting. A 3000K colour temperature was selected for the restaurant and highly visible kitchen for warmth while still providing the right illumination level for tasks to be carried out by the chefs.
Downstairs resides a private dining room, offering a more relaxed space with rustic exposed brick walls grazed with upward linear light to the perimeter, highlighting the texture. Lights were integrated into feature floating shelves to leave displayed objects in silhouette.
Sketches of local Chiswick life adorn the walls; Foundry have used traditional decorative picture lights to highlight the artwork standing proudly on the original brick walls.
The lighting throughout the restaurant focuses on the modern British restaurant’s real quality and complements the parred back interior design scheme.
