HAZEL Restaurant

Case description

For the HAZEL restaurant in Melbourne, Australia, our factory provided fully customized furniture for the entire venue—encompassing street-facing casual seating, a long window-side dining zone, wall-aligned banquettes, an open bar area, and private dining rooms.

This project involved the conversion of a century-old building into a dining space, leveraging expansive windows and the vintage architectural foundation to cultivate a soft, “light-luxury” dining atmosphere. The client faced a unique set of implementation challenges: commercially available mass-produced furniture often featured overly complex designs and discordant color palettes, running counter to the space’s original design intent of simplicity and timeless elegance. Furthermore, the building’s original structural beams, columns, and double-height ceilings created spatial proportion imbalances that standard off-the-shelf furniture could not accommodate—particularly regarding the specific layouts required for the window-side dining areas and wall boundaries. As the venue prioritized long-term operational stability, concerns arose regarding the durability of standard materials; typical upholstered fabrics are prone to aging and yellowing, while wood finishes can suffer from fading and deterioration under prolonged exposure to light. Additionally, achieving material and color consistency across the distinct palettes of vintage walnut and light apricot proved difficult; as a cross-border project, the risk of color calibration discrepancies and fragmented soft-furnishing styles made it challenging to create a cohesive atmosphere that felt both warm, relaxed, and truly enduring.

To address these multifaceted challenges, we devised a comprehensive, integrated customization and procurement solution centered on a core aesthetic of 1970s-era minimalist vintage design. We conducted precise site surveys to map the double-height space and natural lighting boundaries, optimizing furniture scale and volume to balance the building’s expansive proportions. We streamlined superfluous design lines, selecting light-resistant, fade-proof solid wood substrates and anti-aging, skin-friendly upholstery fabrics. We implemented specialized finishing processes to ensure resistance against sun damage, wear-and-tear, stains, and abrasion, while guaranteeing structural stability and longevity. By unifying the texture and color palette across the entire space—utilizing warm, low-saturation tones—we successfully balanced ergonomic comfort for daily dining with perfect aesthetic harmony alongside the building’s vintage architecture. We managed the entire process end-to-end—from raw material sourcing and customized manufacturing to cross-border logistics and precise on-site installation—ensuring the furniture integrated seamlessly with the century-old building’s hardscape and natural lighting environment.

Upon the completion of the furniture installation, the space fully realized its intended atmosphere—warm, vintage, and relaxed. The furniture fits the venue’s layout and lighting conditions flawlessly, facilitating smooth and logical circulation paths. Our weather-resistant protective finishes effectively guard against light-induced deterioration, making daily cleaning and maintenance effortless while ensuring the furniture retains its stable, unfaded quality over years of continuous use. The client highly commended our customized procurement services, praising our precise execution of an “eternally minimalist” design philosophy. We successfully resolved complex implementation challenges—such as adapting to the spatial constraints of an aging structure and addressing issues related to lighting and material degradation—thereby striking a perfect balance between spatial aesthetics and long-term commercial functionality. Ultimately, we successfully completed the comprehensive delivery of the interior soft furnishings.