Duende Restaurant

Neil’s client for the restaurant interior design, Nic Trimboli, has an excellent track record in very successful hospitality venues throughout Perth and Fremantle. Neil & Nic worked together on the interior design for Duende restaurant. Spatial planning and consideration of the restaurant customers experience was all important for Nic. Equally important was the working of the kitchen and Nic ensured that there were many meetings with the chef to ensure clear understanding between all parties through the design process.

The name of this restaurant, ‘Duende’, is fascinating in itself with the Collins dictionary providing a rather uninspiring description: ‘a special quality or charm that makes a person irresistibly attractive’. This description, however, really misses the mark for this Spanish term that relates to flamenco dancing. My understanding is that the word describes a moment in the Flamenco dance when the guitarist and the dancer reach an entwined crescendo as one. It is said that ‘Duende’ is difficult to translate into words as it is a state of mind of almost unconscious experience.

I have read that Australian musician Nick Cave has described the term and expressed a relationship with his work and the music of other contemporary artists in a lecture he gave on ‘the nature of a love sone’ in Vienna in 1999. The following is an excerpt from that lecture: In his brilliant lecture entitled "The Theory and Function of Duende" Federico García Lorca attempts to shed some light on the eerie and inexplicable sadness that lives in the heart of certain works of art. "All that has dark sound has duende", he says, "that mysterious power that everyone feels but no philosopher can explain." In contemporary rock music, the area in which I operate, music seems less inclined to have its soul, restless and quivering, the sadness that Lorca talks about. Excitement, often; anger, sometimes: but true sadness, rarely, Bob Dylan has always had it. Leonard Cohen deals specifically in it. It pursues Van Morrison like a black dog and though he tries to he cannot escape it. Tom Waits and Neil Young can summon it. It haunts Polly Harvey. My friends the Dirty Three have it by the bucket load. The band Spiritualized are excited by it. Tindersticks desperately want it, but all in all it would appear that duende is too fragile to survive the brutality of technology and the ever-increasing acceleration of the music industry. Perhaps there is just no money in sadness, no dollars in duende. Sadness or duende needs space to breathe. Melancholy hates haste and floats in silence. It must be handled with care."

All love songs must contain duende. For the love song is never truly happy. It must first embrace the potential for pain. Those songs that speak of love without having within in their lines an ache or a sigh are not love songs at all but rather Hate Songs disguised as love songs and are not to be trusted. These songs deny us our humanness and our God-given right to be sad and the airwaves are littered with them. The love song must resonate with the susurration of sorrow, the tintinnabulation of grief. The writer who refuses to explore the darker regions of the heart will never be able to write convincingly about the wonder, the magic and the joy of love for just as goodness cannot be trusted unless it has breathed the same air as evil — the enduring metaphor of Christ crucified between two criminals comes to mind here — so within the fabric of the love song, within its melody, its lyric, one must sense an acknowledgement of its capacity for suffering’.

Having already designed the building itself for the property owner, Neil was delighted for the opportunity to work with the tenant of the restaurant space, client, Nic Trimboli who had a proven track record of successful hospitality venues. Trimboli was big on detail, location and arrangement of the kitchen and bar, the orientation of diners when seated, the feel of the place and ultimately the cost. Within this framework Neil devised a layout and feel for the interior that responded to the tapering plan form of the building itself. 

By locating the bar space centrally within the tenancy this effectively separated the restaurant space into three zones of two sides and a front at the buildings rounded corner. This ‘tension’ and narrowing of the table areas provided heightened intimacy and visual separation in the restaurant that assists with the atmosphere on nights when there are less people in the restaurant. Further, the bar plan form reflects the perimeter walls of the restaurant tenancy, working with the building rather than fighting against it with complicated planning arrangements.

The bar itself has suspended storage racks above it which allow visual connection below them at visual ‘pinch-points’.

It has been rewarding to see the ongoing success of this interior with the restaurant remaining very popular despite a change in ownership of the restaurant. The design of the restaurant interior was carried out in late 2002 with the restaurant opening in 2023. It is very satisfying as a designer to see the interior design of the restaurant remain relevant after all these years.

While sustainability was not at the core of the design, the ongoing relevance of the robust interior design does in fact reflect sustainability through its continued use.