We began with what was already there. The original tuff masonry was recovered and left exposed as the space's defining material. The bar counter is built from the reassembled wooden tables of the restaurant that stood here before — kept with their marks intact, the names, scratches, and incisions left by years of former customers carried into the surface rather than sanded away. A warm, dark-stained timber floor runs throughout, grounding the rooms and letting the raw stone and saturated colour hold their intensity. The colour concept grew from the restaurant's own name — Persika, "peach" in both Swedish and Neapolitan dialect — into a warm, enveloping palette that sets the material and sensory tone of each space, moving from the lighter, coral-toned front room to a deeper, more intimate room behind, closed by a red curtain.
The tables in the main room are made entirely from offcuts of marble — pieces discarded for a crack, an irregular edge, or a shift in colour, collected from a local stonemason and given a second life. No two are alike. They sit on bentwood Thonet-style chairs that root the room in the language of the Neapolitan trattoria, raised and made precise.
At the centre of the room is the bar front, faced in ceramic tiles we designed and hand-painted one by one. The geometric pattern, the colour combinations drawn from the peach tones of the walls, and the sequence — apparently random, in fact closely composed — were all worked out tile by tile. It is the one graphic event in an otherwise tonal, material room.
Every surface and fixture is bespoke, and the project was built through close collaboration with the artisans who made it: the ceramicists who hand-painted the tiles, the carpenters and joiners who reassembled the counter and built the furniture, the stoneworkers who cut and finished the marble. Each element carries the trace of the hand that made it.
The kitchen is not hidden but framed — a clean opening cut into the deep red wall, putting the work of the chef on view from the dining room. That gesture finds its fullest form in the vaulted cellar at the back: a low brick-and-tuff room painted in lacquer red, lined with wine and books, where a handful of counter seats sit within reach of the pass. No reservation, a looser register, and a direct view of the night's service.
Particular care went to the sensory life of the space. Lighting was studied fixture by fixture — industrial pendants and long articulated wall lamps, warm and low — while acoustic comfort was addressed directly, with panels integrated into the ceiling to soften the room without disturbing its character. The intensity carries through to the smallest room: the bathroom, finished in full saturated red, holds the concept to the very end.
The project reached its full form in collaboration with Unfolding Studio, which developed the logo, coordinated palette, signage, and printed matter throughout — ensuring complete coherence between the architecture and its visual identity.