Jeremy King’s grand café on Queensway, a mid-century Manhattan room set beside Kensington Gardens.
Restaurant, Westminster, UK
At the top of Queensway, opposite the northern gates of Kensington Gardens, The Park is Jeremy King’s first restaurant in west London and his first in a new building. The brief looked across the Atlantic: a classic brasserie seen through mid-century New York, with the Four Seasons at the Seagram Building as the touchstone.
Studio Shayne Brady answered with a tight palette of Limba timber, leather, brass and alabaster. Honeyed panelling and tone-on-tone leather banquettes set the register, curved Limba forms draw you in from the street, and a double-curved staircase drops to the floor below. The café curtain is reworked as brass and timber louvres, and the alabaster lights were drawn for the room. What makes it stand out is the restraint: a mural planned for the main dining room was dropped late on, and the wall left bare.