Restaurant, Bar and Cafe Interiors Australia: Our Favourite in Hospitality Design

Our deep dive into Melbourne’s hospitality scene unearthed a goldmine of exceptional spaces across the rest of the country, and we’ve compiled a small but mighty selection of some of our favourites. Here’s our top picks in hospitality interiors—the Australia-wide edition!

Cicciabella, Parramatta – Fiona Lynch Studios

Our love for this contemporary Italian diner is rooted in Cicciabella’s innovative combinations of surfaces and textures, described aptly as ‘polished urban grit’ by its designers. The plush and sophisticated seamlessly meets the edgy and avant-garde—velvet and leather share space with steel, bluestone and timber, concrete columns engraved with graffiti and a bar cladded in crushed, painted cardboard. It’s classic banquet dining made playful, in one glance rich and refined and in the next raw, scuffed, and stylishly roughed-up.

Agnes, Fortitude Valley QLD – Amok Studio

A restaurant specialising in the ancient art of wood-fire cooking, Agnes is a blacksmith’s forge if it were given a contemporary, culinary makeover by Amok Studio. The design is stripped-back and elemental, cleverly utilising components of the formerly dilapidated warehouse to put the urban in urban-chic; naturally degraded wall surfaces, exposed brick and concrete constitute a backdrop against which the clean, orderly restaurant floor and its sleek finishes form a striking contrast. In a space exclusively dedicated to serving wood-fired cuisine straight from its custom stone hearth, the dark and smoky colour palette resonates strongly; it’s almost as though Agnes has been forged from charcoal and ash just like the food served from its kitchen.

Sol Bar and Restaurant, South Australia – Genesin Studio & Walter Brooke Architects

There’s something special about a space which honours the landscape of its hometown like the Sol Bar & Restaurant does. Featuring locally quarried green granite, Mintaro slate, and an earthy palette, it’s an ode to the varied textures and colours of the South Australian environment. The rocky mountain ranges, vast brown outback, and smooth curving boulders of Granite Country are all referenced in the construction of this inner-city venue—where round, undulating silhouettes and rough-form materials are underscored by shiny, sharp granite and polished timber. Even from its place high on the ninth floor, Sol stays grounded firmly in the natural world.

Edition Coffee Roasters, Sydney – YSG Studio

Edition Coffee Roasters is the epitome of Japandi design; the marriage of Japanese rustic minimalism with Scandinavian functionality to create something organic and natural, humble and stripped-back. The dark, monochromatic palette together with sparse furnishings and flowing, seamless surfaces evokes an uncluttered and mediative sense of calm. YSG have sought an array of beautiful materials hailing back to Japan; Fujian granite cobblestones, Japanese maple, traditionally charred timber and shirasu kabe—a plaster made of natural volcanic materials. When combined with more contemporary finishes in concrete and rock, the result is a highly textured space which is both modern and sculptural yet a slice of traditional rural Japanese life. It’s the kind of place where you’ll be savouring your morning latte so you can enjoy the stunning surroundings just a little bit longer.

Locura Bar, Byron Bay – Pattern Studios

The phrase ‘raw beauty’ gets thrown around a lot, but this minimalist bar and diner in Byron Bay possesses exactly that. Designed by Pattern Studios, the space remains mostly undecorated so that the rough, industrial textures of steel, concrete and brick can be celebrated. Patchy brushwork walls of various different shades create the sense of orderly chaos, artistically unworked for that ‘polished urban grit’ we mentioned before. But then there are the bathrooms; a striking and unexpected contrast to the rough-hewn, moody bar space outside, a vivid and colourful maze thanks to LED light installations bathing the room in RBG colour scales à la James Turrell.