Camaraderie Restaurant

The design for this chef-owned restaurant converts an existing, former residential garage and wood shop into an elevated family-style restaurant. We strove to retain as much of the existing building as possible, reusing almost all of the existing structure, concrete slab, and exterior metal wall panels. Imagined as an “urban cabin,” the 32-seat dining room is wrapped in birch wall panels and built-in banquette seating. The design takes advantage of the existing building’s high ceilings, wrapping alternating bays of existing manufactured wood trusses in birch panels to frame the skylights in the gable roof above. The kitchen, at the heart of the project, opens like a stage on to the dining room, where guests have an uninterrupted view of the chef at work. The bar, which features custom metal shelving and perforated metal panels, opens onto a covered patio that extends the geometry of the roof towards the street and is punctuated by illuminated columns. Sculptural aluminum canopies mark the new entrances and a painted graphic accentuates the exterior metal wall panels.