Luckie Food
Lounge
Challenge
Luckie Food Lounge is the restaurant debut of visionary club entrepreneur Mike Boles, the developer and former owner of Atlanta’s Compound night club. Benefitting from an ideal Centennial Hill location that brings in locals and visitors alike, the enormous eatery features a fantastic world of the latest technology and clever new service industry twists.
While Creative Director at thing farm, David VanArsdale, along with thing farm Designer and Operations Director, David Ringholz, designed and fabricated custom interior furnishings and lighting for the sushi bar area of Luckie. The initial vision for sushi bar seating entailed multiple tables and a continuous overhead box light. This brief, though it accommodated some of the needs of use, failed to answer some of the more exciting questions related to community, privacy, and interaction.
Solution
Understanding the context of the space, the design team approached the volume as a sedate oasis in an otherwise intense dining and entertainment experience. The alternative plan that emerged consisted of a single, unified bamboo table and multiple overhead lighting pieces.
This approach fueled a reconsideration of the entire sushi bar area on the owner’s side and resulted in their request for the design of a flowing bamboo ceiling that interacts with the structural steel used in the building.
With our clients’ approval and full confidence, we produced our proposed twenty-foot bamboo communal dining table along with twenty-nine custom light fixtures.
Each ‘Luckie Blossom’ light pendant was designed, machined, and hand-assembled in-house from aluminum, delrin, and silicone. The pendants actively respond to movements in the space below. As people move beneath the blossoms, they magically open up to welcome and bathe guests in a soft glow produced by halogen bulbs resting in tubes of microscopic glass bubbles.
Results
The resulting sushi-bar area succeeds in allowing the refined, industrial aesthetic of the surrounding restaurant to cross-fade with the organic glow of the massive tropical fish tanks behind the sushi bar.
This project was honored with the 2007 Atlanta Downtown Design Excellence Award for interior space design.
