2020 Eat Drink Design Awards: Best Restaurant Design

Jury comment

Hotel restaurants can sometimes be an afterthought, but Mat Lindsay’s austerely chic Poly, in the basement of the Paramount House Hotel in Sydney’s Surry Hills, stands apart as a destination in its own right. Located on a semi-subterranean inner-city corner, the fitout responds intelligently to a difficult site. Featuring a sweeping bar and a daringly exposed open kitchen, there’s a restraint and timelessness to the design that suggests a long life ahead. Communal tables, exposed utilities, raw brick and polished concrete make for a sparse, industrial, yet absolutely on-the-pulse spot to dine. The 80-seat venue is just as accessible for a late snack as it is for a lengthy lunch, and proves a worthy sequel to Lindsay’s legendary Ester in nearby Chippendale. The vision from Anthony Gill Architects is beautifully resolved and elegant in its simplicity. “I can see this place looking exactly the same 20 years from now,” noted one of the jurors. Everyone agreed: Poly is a keeper.

Design statement

Poly is a restaurant and bar located at the base of the Paramount House Hotel. It reworks the existing ground floor of the warehouse to create a dining room with two long bars and an open kitchen with a flame grill at the centre. Poly was designed to feel like it had always been there; the new work within the space is difficult to identify. The walls, which use recycled brick to match the existing, allowed us to reconfigure rooms, with the bottom two bricks left raw to cope with mopping. The openings in these new walls are support- ed by expressed concrete lintels – low thresholds that signal a shift in use. The new charcoal concrete floor rises up to form two long bars and the kitchen servery. The fine steel shelving and framing for the banquette are treated like furniture, positioned between the brick columns. Initially, the original timber ceiling was exposed, but acoustic issues with the hotel above obliged the architects to revisit this. A new acoustic ceiling was installed, concealing the main structure but arcing away from the windows to provide relief.

Poly
74–76 Commonwealth Street
Surry Hills, New South Wales
polysurryhills.com.au

Anthony Gill Architects
Level 2, Suite 206
61 Marlborough Street
Surry Hills, New South Wales
gillarchitects.com.au

Project team
Anthony Gill, Luisa Campos.

See the whole gallery of images at the Eat Drink Design Awards website.

The 2020 Eat Drink Design Awards are organized by Architecture Media and supported by supporting partners Chandon Australia, Latitude and Roca.

The Eat Drink Design Awards are endorsed by the Australian Institute of Architects and the Design Institute of Australia.