A new Asian dining experience

The interior design project for the Sushi Club restaurant, a collaboration between a young food entrepreneur and Maurizio Lai from Maurizio Lai Architects, envisages design not just as a means of generating an experience, forms and atmospheres but also a tool that contributes to the creation of a distinctive brand.
An architect, scenographer and designer, Maurizio Lai is a highly original artist renowned for his visually stunning restaurant, retail and hospitality spaces. At the beginning of his career he worked in television and fashion design, but soon branched off into the commercial and tourism sectors. Winner of the Restaurant & Bar Design Award for Best Lighting Design International, he was nominated for the Dezeen Awards 2020 for Best Interior Design Studio of the Year.
With locations in Cesano Maderno, Saronno, Corbetta, Castellanza and Lipomo (Como), Lai’s restaurant format has transformed the concept of the Asian dining experience by placing it within a completely novel aesthetic and formal context.
The restaurants are conceived as a kind of scenic backdrop, with a compositional language that is expressed through the materials, the design of the volumes and the diffused lighting that culminates in the large central light installation.
In Lai’s creations, the movable furniture, the light fixtures and the scenery are all designed and built by hand.
The restaurant extends over an approximately 1,000 square metre area on two levels.
The interiors follow a continuous colour scheme that makes preferential use of warm and dark tones and contrasts effectively with the dramatic lighting design.
The light inserts on the vertical surfaces are arranged in a precise pattern that is enhanced by the ceiling installations and further amplified by the wall-mounted mirrors in the main hall.
The dialogue between materials and light is clearly evident in all the rooms, including the stairs and passageways which maintain the same immersive atmosphere as the rest of the restaurant.
Ceramic tiles play an important role due to their functional characteristics as well as their ability to contrast with and enhance the original lighting design through compositional and colour choices.
The porcelain floor and wall tiles echo the location’s warm, dark tones. This applies equally to the aged wood-effect tiles from Ceramica Sant’Agostino’s Blendart Gray collection, which recreate a varnished effect superimposed on the wood grain, and to the Concrete collection slabs from DSG Ceramiche — the porcelain stoneware division of Decoratori Bassanesi — chosen in a large format for the walls of the staircases and landings.