This new restaurant will be a welcoming, informal, cozy, comfortable space in which to share meals. Proprietors and chefs (and charming married couple) Carrie Puffer Blease and Rupert Blease aim to ensure that guests leave the restaurant with a feeling of well-being, satisfaction and nourishment from their surroundings as well as their meal.

Studio BBA approached the design in keeping with this aim, and in synchronicity with the chefs’ approach to food—naturally elegant, carefully thought out, amazing ingredients and a lack of complication. We peeled away unnecessary layers in the two-story space to expose its simple raw beauty, and its tall north and east facing windows.

A few minimal but interesting, honest and homey insertions were added to set the tone for the restaurant: a new front door with “Welcome” stenciled into the sidewalk, a poured concrete floor, a white custom-textured concrete bar, a modern steel railing, a sculptural lighting installation and custom wood tables. The owners commission their personal friend, textile artist Ashley Helvey, to create a wall-mounted felt piece with the texture of fur.