It was such a pleasure to work in the beautiful surroundings of the De Grendel Estate and to remodel the restaurant’s restrooms.
By incorporating solid oak skirting and doors, we were able to work with the existing design language of the restaurant’s interior and the existing architecture of the building.
All the interior walls were demolished, and some windows were re-positioned so that more toilets and urinals could be added. We then built new dividing walls for the cubicles, repositioned the layout and converted an existing office into a wheelchair-accessible bathroom and baby-changing area.
The concept was to work with design references from the De Grendel manor house – which was built in 1898 in the style of architect Herbert Baker. The Cape Dutch heritage was incorporated with the reference to Delft Blue pottery in the Cara Saven wallpaper which we chose for the entrance, as well as the blue and white colour theme we worked with throughout.
The lighting from Eichholtz was carefully chosen for both the ceiling fitting and the wall lights. We included a sensor so that extraction and lighting is only switched on when needed.
The concept around the flooring was again in reference to Cape Dutch architecture which used wooden floorboards – with older boards being sometimes being replaced with a different type of timber. We interpreted this style by using wood-look tiles and inset-patterned tiles and laying then in a particular pattern.
For the WC cubicle walls we chose cladding porcelain marble-look tiles from Womag. We made up a custom beading edge detail with matching engineered stone from Granite Projects (the same as the vanity top in the ladies’ restrooms). Two-tone KitKat tiles from Douglas Jones (so-called because of their resemblance to the chocolate confectionary) were used in the men’s basin area and as a decorative band above the urinals, which are from Duravit.
The final layer was the selection of carefully chosen accessories sourced locally from two different suppliers. We chose finishes that complemented each interior – black for the men’s bathrooms and matte gold for the ladies’ bathrooms. The large hooks are from Knus and the paper holder and soap holders are from Douglas and Douglas.