Restaurant Hafen / Susanne Fritz Architekten

Architects

Susanne Fritz Architekten

Location

Romanshorn, Switzerland

Area

150.0 sqm

Project Year

2015

Photographs

Pierre Kellenberger

Location

Romanshorn, Switzerland

At the beginning of 2015, the Swiss lakeport town of Romanshorn and SBS, a Swiss corporate shipping line servicing Lake Constance, created a new, attractive urban space directly along the shoreline. Now a restaurant has been erected on a promenade built into the lake, a locale whose architecture is completely characterised by ships and the seafaring world. Given that the SBS building is protected as an historic landmark, what Susanne Fritz, an interior architect based in Zurich, encountered was a former storeroom that, according to the builders’ wishes, was supposed to be transformed into a spectacular restaurant fully symbolic of nautical science. Five portholes inserted into the side walls with diameters of up to 1.4 metres were envisaged to create transparency vis-à-vis the adjacent premises and optically enlarge the space, which is only around 150 mÇ large. Although a large-scale kitchen to provide catering for the shipping trade is already in place in the rear section of the building, a portion of the restaurant area was sacrificed in favour of a satellite kitchen to keep routes short and workflows efficient. All of the restaurant’s pendant light fixtures are flexibly and adjustably mounted on track lighting systems because seating arrangements at the restaurant vary in winter and summer. In the summertime personnel routes lead through windows that fold back to access the large outdoor terrace with seating for 100. The terrace is spanned by a year-round roofing membrane that provides shade in the summer and keeps it usable when it rains. The windows are shut in the wintertime; more tables are placed inside the restaurant to substitute, creating indoor seating for 80. Keeping in mind that the broadly ranging target group consists of tourists, people in transit from the railway and ferry, families and local business folk, the restaurant has to fulfil the widest variety of needs on the smallest amount of space.