FOCUS 055 Further info
The Loughton store was the first of nearly 70 Nando’s designs, and won a prize for its imaginative homage to the car dealership that once stood there
Nando’s in Croydon featured a rich, textured palette, including a wall of terracotta ridge tiles
Bright yellow windowsill tiles draw visitors into the Peckham restaurant
Budget corrugated sheeting cut into shapes provided a unique finish in the Greenwich restaurant
Nando’s in Glasgow was decorated with a container-load of old shutters
Sound waves from South African music were converted into salt patterns and then into cork ceiling tiles in the Soho restaurant
be art, or can be functional or can be reused, so part of my approach is to change the perception of materials and use them in ways that they have not been used before.’ Trush put this ethos to work in the very first restaurant that STAC designed for the chain back in 2013, which was set in a former car dealership and petrol station in Loughton that had been a local landmark since the 1950s. ‘Te community grew up with that and were precious about this old car dealership, so the design needed to be sympathetic to what it once was. To keep that spirit alive, we covered the walls with car parts, by flattening doors, bonnets and panels and turning them into cladding. We even made chandeliers from car headlamps.’ To add a traditional African touch, he built a curved rammed earth mud wall inside the restaurant – but using clay dug up from the Tames estuary nearby for local authenticity. Te team’s vibrant creation for the new Loughton restaurant won a Restaurant & Bar Design Award, which turned out to be the first of many, with STAC’s designs for Nando’s in Peckham, Harrogate and Swindon also winning awards.
Trush’s personal favourite of the portfolio so far is the Nando’s in Croydon. ‘We were given this plain retail box on a retail park and we had to create something that was a destination and felt special,’ he explains. ‘Te solution was to take ordinary materials and use them in extraordinary ways, so we had a 20m-long wall made with regular terracotta Victorian ridge tiles, used vertically as cladding, plus a light sculpture running through the middle of the restaurant like a spine.’ Te key, he says, is to take something ordinary and everyday and transform it into something extraordinary. ‘I like to be quite clever with the budget; some designers might specify an expensive tile but only be able to use a
little. I’d rather find an everyday material that’s a fraction of the cost per square metre and cut it up or do something different and creative with it,’ says Trush. So, at Peckham, for example, he created an entire arched infrastructure of wooden blocks within the box of the restaurant, creating the illusion of walking in through a railway-arch style tunnel, before leading customers through to the back of the restaurant where they are greeted with a bright wall clad in glossy, off-the-shelf yellow windowsill tiles. Other unusual material choices include using the corrugated sheeting used for cheap roofing; in the Greenwich restaurant he cut it into small pieces with a CNC cutter and using them to clad a curved wall, with the shapes changing slowly as the wall progresses. Perhaps the most surprising is the cork ceiling in Nando’s in Soho. Te restaurant company has a policy of supporting young South African musicians by facilitating collaborations with established UK artists. As part of this programme, they wanted to include a recording studio in the restaurant – and STAC was tasked with making it unique. ‘We took one of these songs and used a piece of equipment that generated the sound waves into a visible wave, then put Nando’s peri peri salt on a platform and used that sound wave to generate a pattern. Tis informed a shape that was then sculpted out of a highly sustainable cork block,’ explains Trush. Te cork was chosen because of its Portuguese heritage that fitted in with Nando’s Portuguese-style food, as well as its environmental credentials. ‘We found a cork material that didn’t have any chemicals or binding agents but was simply compressed under high pressure and heat, and we used a CNC machine to cut out the sculptural shapes and forms. Sometimes our work definitely blurs the boundaries between interior design, architecture and art.’
ALL IMAGES: COURTESY OF STAC
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