Konstam at the Prince Albert


The ambition of chef and café-owner, Oliver Rowe, was to open a restaurant serving food sourced only from within the Greater London area.  When an old pub became available across the road from Konstam, his café in Kings Cross, he took advantage of the opportunity, inviting Heatherwick Studio to work with him on the project.
The character of this listed building is clearly that of a London pub.  The dilemma was how to avoid the gastro-pub stereotype of scrubbed, pared-back décor, without making a disconnected piece of modern design that denies the building's original identity.
An early decision was to make the project be a kitchen in which diners can sit and eat, the chefs providing the focal point, and walls holding open shelves for cooking equipment and jars of food preserved for the winter. 
The need to light the tables, combined with the unavoidable pub-like character of the windows, gave rise to the idea of using the lighting to make a symbolic connection between window and table.  The frame of each of the fifty-seven window panes is fringed with hundreds of fine metal chains, drawn up into draped bundles which are slung over hooks in the ceiling before flaring downwards to form lampshades over every table, using a total of 110 kilometres of chain.
The restaurant, which opened in April 2006, was featured in a ten-program television series, "The Urban Chef", which aired on BBC2.