Dining amongst precious stones

The Asahi Japanese restaurant in Cernusco sul Naviglio, completed in 2021, welcomes guests into its gold-tinted, Oriental-style ambience in a building with geometric, contemporary volumes. It stands out for its sophisticated and vibrant atmosphere, its expansive volumes and its warm, balanced lighting. Converted from its original use as a showroom, the Asahi restaurant building has the form of a luminous parallelepiped, its façade punctuated by vertical elements interspersed with glazing. « The Asahi restaurant needed a powerful, distinctive design for its new location in Cernusco sul Naviglio, a two-storey building situated on a major shopping street, the Statale Padana Superiore », say architects Simone Marchiorato and Sabrina Gallini from the Milan-based practice SGSM Studio, who have completed numerous projects in the restaurant sector. The floor plan consists of an open space on the ground floor and a sequence of more intimate areas on the upper floor. The walls with their interplay of glass, mirrors and vertical light strips animate the various rooms filled with ivory-coloured tables, armchairs and sofas. The illumination consists of diffuse lighting provided by large, slender ceiling rings designed by the architects themselves, in some cases mounted with a slight overlap, alternating with golden cylinders which project a beam of spot lighting from above.
The warm ambient light is further enhanced by the large polished porcelain floor and wall tiles chosen from the Florim range: Ombre de Caravage and Onyx Blanche from the Les Bijoux de Rex collection, whose surfaces are inspired by marble and precious minerals; Étoile Crème from Étoile de Rex, reminiscent of the deep vein effect of rare marble; and Golden Onyx from the Onyx&More collection, which reinterprets onyx with porphyry inserts..
As the architects explain, the design maintains a sense of balance between the various surfaces, contrasting light and intermediate tones with darker, deeper colours: « The clients’ request was for a restaurant with a medium level of brightness and a harmonious balance of light and dark. The use of contrasting and only seemingly incompatible colours and the daring combination of dark, intermediate and light tones achieved the desired result. » The soft, inviting tactility of the surfaces and the high performance characteristics of the materials further improved the perceived environmental quality throughout the restaurant. « We opted for surfaces with a sophisticated design and finish that would make a significant contribution in terms of quality and technical performance and consequently visual impact, maintenance and durability. » Porcelain stoneware is also used for the bar counter, where the contrast between light and dark surfaces is accentuated by strip lighting concealed in the upper edge of the structure. « The high-gloss finish on both the horizontal and vertical surfaces fully met our expectations and helped us achieve our goal of creating an exclusive space with a strongly classical yet contemporary feel, » conclude Marchiorato and Gallini.