Australasia’s best-designed hospitality venues have been named in the annual Eat Drink Design Awards, celebrating design excellence and innovation.
The winners were announced on 8 November at the official awards ceremony held in Melbourne.
Kick starting a big night for Melbourne venues was Higher Ground café and its design team DesignOffice winning Best Café Design.
The hospitality judges commended the venue for solving logistical challenges while safeguarding and respecting the historic former power station site.
“The design team has shown considerable restraint in defining the space, creating a host of experiences at different levels (both literally and figuratively), resulting in an urban drawing room,” the judges said.
With the client’s ambition to create a “hotel without rooms” and make something unseen in Melbourne’s café space, the judges said the finished venue is “remarkably comfortable”. It includes a variety of spaces and perches created at different levels that provides many opportunities for diners to get comfortable and observe the crowd.
Best Retail Design was awarded to Lune Croissanterie by Studio Esteta in Fitzroy, Victoria.
The jury said Lune Croissanterie is many things all at once: an experience, an event, a showroom for goods, even a shrine complete with altar, all to the greater glory of one thing – the croissant.
“Lune Croissanterie perfectly showcases the prodigious talents required to create this one type of pastry, along with various variations on the core retail theme,” the jury said.
Referred to by one juror as the “Apple Store of croissants,”the interior perfectly manifests the concept of experiential retail with a result that’s “self-confident yet fabulous.”
Dinner by Heston Blumenthal, designed by Bates Smart, was awarded Best Restaurant Design.
The award streak for Melbourne continued with this year’s jury inducting the Italian dining institution Il Bacaro, designed by Chris Connell Design, into the Eat Drink Design Awards’ Hall of Fame.
In a boom for the southern state, Adelaide is now home to both the Best Bar Design and Best Identity Design category winner, the celebrated Pink Moon Saloon.
The annual Eat Drink Design Awards celebrate design excellence within Australian and New Zealand hospitality premises that have opened to the public in the past eighteen months. The Awards provide a unique insight into contemporary Australasian architecture and design.
For more information and full results visit gallery.eat-drink-design.com/