JULIA STREET RESTAURANT
LOCATION: Warehouse District, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA
PROGRAM: Bar & Restaurant Renovation
CLIENT: Confidential
STATUS: Design
PROJECT TEAM: GOAT (Architecture and Interiors)
In the heart of the Warehouse District’s gallery row, GOAT developed this new restaurant concept to simultaneously augment and poke fun at the White Linen Night scene. The existing shell space was formerly a beer bar with dark, industrial finishes and the client challenged the GOAT design team to completely reinvent the energy of the restaurant with as light of a touch as possible.
To accomplish this, the design team chose to retain most of the space’s original layout and create its new atmosphere by introducing a new palette of finishes, developing a new package of fixtures, furnishings and millwork, as well as highlighting feature areas with irreverent custom art and pops of bold color.
GOAT team: Paula Bechara, Peter Spera III, Colin VanWingen
Naturally, for this location, the star of the show is the art package. With the tight budget in mind, the design team sourced canvas recreations of the most bourgeois possible Victorian, Roccoco, and Baroque portraits, and then proceeded to deface each of them with tongue and cheek graffiti-style tags. The forced collision of these so-called high and low art styles helps to create an atmosphere of amusing irreverence.
The space’s existing finish palette is a decidedly dark and industrial mix of aged masonry, reclaimed wood planks, and charcoal porcelain and steel. One of the primary challenges posed to the design team was to lighten the space while replacing as few of the finishes as possible. This was accomplished by refinishing the wood planks with a whitewash, introducing new cream-colored subway tile in strategic wall and floor locations, and refinishing the remaining walls with light paint and wallcovering. The new furnishings and fixtures strike a balance between the aged and the new, tying them together cohesively. Finally, the new millwork, particularly the central banquette, pulls from both sides of the palette and provides one-of-kind feature elements for the space.
The end result of GOAT’s design efforts is a stark departure from the old beer bar without the need for complete (and expensive) reinvention. The new space is high on energy and luxury, and low on ennui.
