Bibo Budapest, design Astet Studio - Photo © Salva López
Bibo Budapest, design Astet Studio - Photo © Salva López
DATA SHEET

Interior design: Astet Studio/Ala Zreigat and Oscar Engroba
Furniture and lighting: on design by the architects
Photos: Salva López

At 11 Apáczai Csere János utca the entrance to Dani Garcia‘s restaurant and cocktail bar, a recent opening by the Andalusian chef in the Dorottya Hotel, immediately draws the eye with a play of metal spheres and reflective surfaces. A game of illusion and fading that intensifies as you go up to the top floor, to the restaurant with skybar and terrace, where Astet Studio‘s interior design project becomes total staging, hypnotic, imaginative, disorienting.

The intention is to accompany, from the mirrored threshold, «guests into a world of elegance, illusion and artistry», and to challenge their sensory perception in «an environment where light, mirrors and movement dissolve the boundaries between reality and illusion».

Mirrored surfaces, alternating with dark blue wood paneling, also cover the reception area, a fragmented and deceptive space where soft curves and clean-cut edges seek the balance between fixity and movement. In the bar area, the theme of spheres returns as a protagonist, and here they are transparent and dot the ceiling along with off-scale floral elements, «in eternal suspension». The large area dedicated to the restaurant is organized in a series of micro-environments created by the curved shapes of the sofas and the alternating colors in the seating, petrol blue, burnt orange and salmon, on which hang light giant flowers and small glass spheres.

In the background interrupts the visual continuity a series of arches, beyond which are the wine cellar and a private room decorated by a hand-painted mural: a moon that, when reflected, turns from crescent to full.