Pujol Restaurant

We wanted to preserve the essence of the house as a typical dwelling example of the Polanco neighborhood, with a four deck roof and a garden that surrounds and protects it from the street. In such way, potentializing local labor, workforce, materials and processes.

The main challenge of this project was for it to communicate an evolution rather than a simple swap from its previous location to the new one. It was not intended to deny the former Pujol, but instead, to take a series of concepts that characterized it, translate them to the new one and develop them to create a richer experience for the costumer.

The guiding concept was to articulate the different spaces in a journey through different conditions of light, scale, privacy, visual and spatial integration and interior-exterior interaction. We found opportunities in the pre-existences, adapted them and integrated them by enlarging light inputs, eliminating physical barriers that isolated spaces from each other, and removing false ceilings to reinforce the horizontal character of the project, increasing height in some parts and lowering it in others. All of these actions were made with the intention to provide a round experience with a certain level of intimacy and neighborhood scale.

For Enrique Olvera, restaurants must consent, amuse and delight to provide a complete gastronomic experience, which for him is made up of many elements, being the architecture one of the most important. Thus, in Pujol the diversity of Mexican cuisine takes shape of architecture in terrazzo and wooden textures, materials chosen exclusively for this project as a result of an active and continuous communication between client and architect. In such way, the furniture designed by Micaela de Bernardi and the restaurant itself bet on the sobriety and timelessness of modern architecture.

Gardens, courtyards and decks articulate spaces to revive the interior of a house in Polanco, with the reminiscence of the founding colonies of Mexico City. A continous indoors-outdoors relationship takes place and makes the customer interact with the outside in most of the spaces, either towards the gardens or towards the orchards. In addition, each space has different furniture arrangements to reinforce these experiences.

The assemblage is given as a function of the flows, use and appropriation of the different spaces, which ultimately offer new experiences every single time Pujol is visited.