Blacksheep has designed the first ever restaurant for the owners of the award-winning Provencale vineyard "Chateau du Galoupet" in Beauchamp Place, Knightsbridge. The innovative new London restaurant, entitled simply Galoupet, will open in late Spring 2011 and will house both public and private dining areas as well as a retail fine wine store, offering a range of wines from the owners' vineyard, along with other hand-picked bins. The store will also house London's first enomatic champagne machine, which dispenses four types of champagne by the glass at the perfect temperature.
Galoupet will be a two-storey space, with 60sqm on the ground floor (divided into 25sqm of wine store at the front and 35sqm of restaurant space to the rear), plus a further 30sqm of private dining and lounge space on the lower ground floor. The feel of the venue will be informal, welcoming and accessible, with a clean, understated glamour. It will offer an all-day menu of healthy dishes, which draw on Mediterranean and Asian influences, created by head chef Chris Golding. The food offer, both seasonal and sustainable, will be a move away from the typical charcuterie, pate and cheese menu that more traditionally accompanies fine wines and aims to demonstrate that such wines also work very well away from rich and heavy fare.
Visitors to Galoupet will enter the Georgian terraced building directly into the wine store area. Lighting is a very important part of the scheme (Blacksheep worked with Gravity Lighting on this) and here takes the form of "hidden" lighting, set within a swirl-shaped ceiling bay, to create a subtle retail atmosphere and allow the product - housed in bespoke ridged glass display units edged in brass on the right hand wall - to shine. Four large glass floorplates (in a bespoke etched, checked design) will take the retail light down into the lower ground lounge area. Flooring around the glass flooring and through to the back of the restaurant space is pale oak.
A narrower gloss-panelled mid section between the store space and the restaurant will house coffee dispensing machines alongside the oak staircase, which leads down to the lower ground floor, with an all-glass surround and brass balustrade. The "hidden" recessed lighting swirl continues through this space. The restaurant's colours are restrained and subtly glamorous, in off-whites, silvers and gold, with bespoke banquette seating and tables and Hans Wegner "Wishbone" chairs in white. Vertical interest is added through glass panels, edged in brass, whilst angled mirrors allow for people-watching in what is a small and intimate space. Lighting levels are all dimmable to provide for changes in atmosphere from day to night.
On the lower ground floor, the private dining area (for up to 8 people) features a leather-embossed wall and antiqued mirrors with limestone-effect ceramic flooring. A lounge area to the rear is lit from above via the retail area's glass floor plates, slightly recessed into the ceiling with a striking patinated brass surround. This reflective, glamorous surface is picked up in the frame of a large mirror on the wall in this space and in the brass-edged and subtly-lit wine displays to the rear.
This area has a luxe, club feel with faux suede seating and a softening inset rug in the ceramic flooring. A striking feature wall is covered in marbled black, white and gold wallpaper. Furniture is further bespoke banquette seating in graphite grey and freestanding tables and stools in patinated brass with pale grey uppers.
"It was a great pleasure to work with a company that has a passion for design and a commercial understanding of how things work," commented Shaan Mahroti, Operations Director of Galoupet. "Left brain and right brain in perfect harmony!"