When Opus restaurant first mentioned they would be running the café at Ikon Gallery in BrindleyPlace – it was only obvious they would come to us, as we had previously designed their Cornwall Street restaurant in city centre, 7 years ago.

The brief was obviously to leave the infrastructure untouched, and cosmetically enhance the space with the use of colour and furniture whilst keeping with the integrity of a well designed are that was akin to art gallery space.

Over the years you have seen a lot of our domestic projects together with our favourite and new reeled interior decoration items.

We thought it would be good to show some of our commercial projects we do, starting off with Café Opus at Ikon. As with all design work we had a budget to work to.

We decided to spend a significant percentage of this on furniture. We thought it was important that the inside and outside areas had a correlation.  We wanted to create an exciting environment outside the fabulous old school building, which is Ikon Galley.  Colour and material was important to us, the intensity of the yellow in this highly practical and stackable, interior and exterior chair, ticked all the boxes. The chair is manufactured by Magis, and are available from The Aram Shop or Aram Contracts.

The colour yellow is used in the Ikon branding – so we tweaked the colour slightly, and combined the two identities of Opus Restaurant and The Ikon Gallery to come up with the brand that is Café Opus at Ikon.

This yellow was then taken inside along with the chair in grey to create a modern colour palette for the interior space.  We used Formica tops to the existing tables, and fitted upholstered banquette seating to the back wall, which creates warmth and sits comfortably with the fabulous three arched windows.  The general colour scheme was softened by the use of very light warm tones of grey, which are easier on the eye rather than the start white.  The umbrellas outside are four meters square and with the use of specially embroidered blankets to create a warm cost feeling on a cool day!

We think this is a great place to pop in for brunch, dinner or a cup of tea! As well as looking good the food is great too!