A Milanese restaurant where material, colour and integrative raw cuisine define a distinctive space.
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Solo Crudo is a place conceived for those who want to look after themselves, with a supplementary raw-food cuisine that pays particular attention to preserving the beneficial and nutritional properties of ingredients. The restaurant, in Milan's business district, interprets that philosophy aesthetically by focusing on the creation of a harmonious architectural space.
Through four large windows the restaurant opens onto the city and onto BNP's Diamond Tower, striking up a dialogue with it made of reflections and visual interplay. Inside, the palette starts from green — the expression of the restaurant's "gentle cooking" side — and then shifts through the various shades that characterise part of the furniture and the coloured band acting as panelling.
Enriching the space and heightening its "raw" quality is the use of untreated laminates for the screen wall between kitchen and dining room, corten-effect steel, which appears as cladding framing the entrances and engraved on the front of the counter, and wall colour that recalls the materiality of concrete.
The dining room is notionally divided into three continuous areas, each with solutions that suggest different ways of experiencing the restaurant. In the first, directly connected to the entrance, the counter is the focal point: a large horizontal slab of white marble that drops down one side, creating a dialogue of material contrasts and shadows with the corten steel panel cladding it.
The second area, overlooking the Diamond Tower, features a coloured iron structure into which wooden cubes are set as storage, facing a sofa with square tables and the large communal table. Closing the scene on the opposite side is a playful neon composition that gives the restaurant an informal character; in front of it, bespoke round and square tables alternate, with hand-painted ceramic and marble finishes.
Every detail of the restaurant works to celebrate an ideal of nutritional wellbeing carried forward by its supplementary raw-food cuisine, defining a distinctive space able to adapt to the different moments of the day.
