Andrew Wallace has created a sleek, modern Indian restaurant where the food takes centre stage.<br>

17 Jan 2005

by Anna Chambers

THE Khan Saab Indian restaurant in Manchester’s Didsbury by Andrew Wallace Architects + Interior Designers is a modern and minimalist place to enjoy a curry. Passers-by get a full view of the restaurant, with its long, narrow interior with curved ceiling and wall soffit, through a glass frontage on Parrs Wood Road. The space terminates in a burst of colour with a warm red end wall.

As well as its pleasing aesthestic, the curved roof and soffit are functional, delivering air through linear diffusers and concealing extractors and lighting. The sharp angles of the eighteen-metre long rectilinear stainless steel bar are in complete contrast to the curve of the ceiling, and the surfaces of polished stainless steel and glass convey almost clinical cleanliness and hygiene. “In basic terms, the restaurant is about two environments - making and consuming, the distinct experience of preparing food and eating,” says Andrew Wallace. “Each is provided with its own customised architecture.”

The bar is the focal point of the restaurant. Openings with recessed lighting provide shelving for glasses, and glazed apertures carved into the bar allow views of food on display. Catering equipment has been carefully integrated to allow the bar to appear as one controlled monolith. Matching stainless steel cuboid stools provide a place for customers to wait to be seated at their table and a stretch of floor recessed lighting breaks up the floor plane below.

The dining area uses warm, sustainable hardwoods, with furniture and fittings in leather, walnut and glass that follow the longitudinal axis of the space. Walnut boarding on the walls curves in tandem with the ceiling soffit, with lighting emphasising the place where the two overlap. Furniture seems to grow from the floor and walls as an integral part of the interior. External signage is in polished and brushed stainless steel lettering, back lit with red neon and puncture-lit in yellow.

Photography by Daniel Hopkinson, graphic by Picto