British architects and designers SHH have brought together and led an all-star team - including furniture designer Stefan Bench, lighting designers .PSLAB and Chelsea Flower Show double-gold medallist garden designer Kate Gould – to create two stunning new restaurant spaces within London’s Barbican Centre.

SHH answered a brief from the Barbican to make the most of the location within this iconic building envelope, in order to create the new environments, which aim to become known as destination venues in their own right.

According to SHH’s lead designer on the project Helen Hughes, the project "sought to bring the Centre’s food and beverage offer up to the level of the Barbican’s long-established worldwide reputation for art exhibitions and performances."

SHH served both as interior and branding designer on the project, which encompassed both the former 450 square metre ground floor café, now a restaurant and shop, re-branded as ‘Barbican Foodhall’, and the first floor bar and restaurant - now ‘Barbican Lounge’, as well as the outdoor terrace spaces for both venues.

“Our overall approach", explains Hughes, "was to link the spaces back to the wonderful architecture of the Barbican itself and to celebrate the building’s materiality by exposing the original concrete ceilings, de-cladding the hammered aggregrate walls in the Barbican Lounge space and using Cradley brick pavers for the Foodhall flooring, which not only brought the flooring back in line with the original treatment, but linked it to all the existing external Barbican walkways.

Our second major direction was to create visual connections between the two offers, particularly via the outdoor terraces, which extend from each space. This was achieved partly through planting, but mostly by the design of huge, eye-catching and bespoke-designed umbrellas or ‘urban trees’, made of two off-centre perforated aluminium disks, with the bottom disk measuring 3 metres in width and set into wooden bases, which house both planting and integrated seating.

Finally, we sought to animate the spaces with striking feature areas, details and materials, including a peacock-green resin floor in the Lounge, especially colour-matched to a photo taken in the Summer of the green water of the Barbican outdoor lake, plus great lighting and an unusual mix of furniture including new, bespoke, vintage and specially-reissued items.”

Interior photography Gareth Gardner.

Addtional branding and detail photography Caroline Collett.