Creating a new story of the United States in each of his restaurants, Rudy Guénaire reveals a modular beauty for Nantes PNY

In Nantes, Rudy Guénaire designed the restaurant as if an Italian speedboat had lost direction and ended up in the turquoise waters offshore of the Polynesian islands. In the 1930s, The Pacific islands represented a sort of paradise for the Americans and the Tiki culture quickly became very famous in all of America.

Still obsessed with the idea of cabins and built-in furniture, Guénaire organized the restaurant into a succession of encased modular spaces. Each module is made of hexagonal seatings made of wood covered in marine varnish. The marshmallows-like backrests remind one of a diner, of the sundecks on an Italian speedboat or of an American convertible. The round mirrors are like the eyes of the dolls/statuettes the Polynesians would hide deep into their jungles. Milky-blue windows delimit different spaces and provide privacy, like the sea in between the islands. The wood columns gather all the required equipment the team needs to pilot the restaurant with a maximum of efficacy and comfort.

The bar and stairways, designed like a single object, steps out and appears more like an object one would find on a larger cruise ship. Slower, simpler, it calms the eye and reassures. Every piece of furniture, including the coat hangers, is designed by Guénaire for the project. For the chair, he found his inspiration in the decor of cruise ships from the 1930s and in the set of an old James Bond movie. The suspended lamps look like unidentified flying objects and diffuse a sort of mysterious light. The interstices are everywhere, leaving a little space where too much fullness would have been boring. It is by cutting things in half that the whole becomes full and that everything seems more interesting, as if by magic.