The Bite Magazine - Autumn/Winter 2022 - Issue 32

bitedesign for the World’s Top 50 and Michelin-starred chefs, restauranteurs and leading luxury hotel groups. She combines clarity with an unexpected, expressive signature like Burnt Ends’. The award-winning interior designer turned the mid-century colonial military barracks at 7 Dempsey Road into a mesmerising visual fest blending Pynt’s culinary ethos and ambitions with a dash of his outsized personality.“I loved the orig- inal space at Teck Lim Road, which Dave opened in 2013 and where we first met and became friends,” Maxwell explained. “My challenge with Dempsey was to keep all the features that made the Chi- natown restaurant so memorable in its intimacy whilst evolving them in the context of an enormous new 16,000 sq ft space.” She skilfully solved the challenge with a design that dramatically references the foundational compo- nents and ingredients of a barbecue - flames, wood and metal - whilst anchoring the whole space with generous lashings of imagination and brio. In the dining room, the creative inserted a long slab of Indonesia suar as a counter table to frame the open kitchen with three tonnes of ovens. “The ovens are the heart of the entire restaurant, a constant primordial burning fire of 1000 degrees,” she said. Sustainable materials include teak planks rescued from an old bridge in Surabaya, Indonesia, used to line the floor. The extant square pillars of the old barracks were sheathed in beaten copper panels and their surfaces mottled with random grid-like patterns imprinted from the palettes in which they were stored and transported. A forest of studio lamps hangs from the double-height ceiling, delib- erately broken by the insertion of a faux wooden balcony. The extra wide teak-framed dining chairs are clad in vegetable-dyed leather and embellished on the back with small panels of customised buttons of the skull to reference Burnt Ends’ logo.The massive private dining room, accessed through a heavy teak door with a polished metal skull handle, will raise curiosity. “We wanted this space to be exclusive and a little mysterious so diners in the main dining room might catch a glimpse of the interiors when the door is ajar and be intrigued by the people going in and then they don’t come out again,” Maxwell revealed. Japanese shou sugi ban tradition was adopted to line the dark and mood-lit walls with naturally con- trasting petrified wood and timber panels.Within this room, you’ll find a 14-seater, six-metre-long petrified black wood dining table overshadowed by a tubular light installation of 5,000 black lava stones. Emma Maxwell