Restaurant - Interior Design

"Bonum" meat pies is a restaurant designed after English culture. The overall form of the building is meant to invoke the famous English double-decker bus with its use of glass and rounded corners and top. The use of tubular steel is a reference to the Orbit Tower, the largest public art work in Britain, whose steel structure was built in Olympic Park to commemorate the 2012 London Olympic Games. The s-shaped booths pay homage to "crinkle crinkle" walls, a style of bricklaying popular in Britain for its conservation of brick. The use of plants and the third floor garden in particular are plays on iconic British gardens, attempting to give the customer the illusion of tea in a patch of plants. The analogous color scheme of red, orange, and white all continue these references, with the red in particular working with the double-decker bus and Orbit Tower motifs.

This project called for a restaurant designed after a particular culture and menu and fitting within the lot of a real-world restaurant in Iowa City: George's Buffet. Sam measured the lot and dimensions of George's to determine how to properly size Bonum. The superimposing of Bonum on a picture of George's shows the payoff of this measuring work.

This project required the restaurant to contain a multi-season entrance space, welcome desk, waiting area, bar with at least six seats, at least 64 seats total, a food distribution counter, a kitchen taking up a third of that floor's space, a women's bathroom with two toilets, a men's bathroom with one toilet and one urinal, an ADA accessible gender-neutral bathroom, a staircase, an elevator, a food elevator, a small office, an employee restroom, an employee locker room/changing room, storage rooms, loading and unloading areas, and a trash and recycling space.