Paul Thrush, director of STAC Architecture, explains his firm’s work on Nando’s chains.
Words by Kay Hill
THE PREMISE behind chain restaurants is often relatively straightforward – the universal roll-out of a single brandled design that makes customers feel instantly at home whether they walk into the branch in London, Luton or Los Angeles.
However, instead of this corporate approach, Nando’s, the restaurant chain which blends African and Portuguese culinary traditions to create its legendary peri-peri chicken, demands much more from its designers. Paul Thrush, director of STAC Architecture, is a veteran of 69 Nando’s restaurants – and every single one has been unique.
This idea saw a variation in the corrugated sheeting used in Greenwich. Courtesy Of Stac
‘Nando’s has four design houses and we are one of them,’ says Thrush. ‘The company’s brief is that no restaurant is to be the same – every one needs to be unique and a new experience. It’s great from a design point of view, as we have total freedom and can have a lot of fun, although the downside is that after all that hard work you are only able to use the design once!’
There’s more to it than just coming up with something original every time, however. ‘As well as being unique, it also needs to be a Nando’s – it has to look and feel instinctively like a Nando’s, but not a Nando’s that you have ever seen before,’ Thrush explains. At the heart of each of STAC’s designs is the clever and innovative use of materials – from old car parts and wooden shutters to completely bespoke surfaces.
Croydon’s Nando’s home includes a wall of terracotta ridge tiles. Courtesy Of Stac
‘Nando’s has a South African heritage, [so] they like things to be authentic and authentically African,’ explains Thrush, who was born and brought up in South Africa himself and studied architecture at the University of Cape Town. ‘My approach to materials comes from my upbringing in South Africa. In Africa, nothing is wasted, everything is reused. I grew up seeing that everything can be art, or can be functional or can be reused, so part of my approach is to change the perception of materials and use them in ways that they have not been used before.’
Thrush put this ethos to work in the very first restaurant that STAC designed for the chain back in 2013, which was set in a former car dealership and petrol station in Loughton that had been a local landmark since the 1950s. ‘The community grew up with that and were precious about this old car dealership, so the design needed to be sympathetic to what it once was. To keep that spirit alive, we covered the walls with car parts, by flattening doors, bonnets and panels and turning them into cladding. We even made chandeliers from car headlamps.’ To add a traditional African touch, he built a curved rammed earth mud wall inside the restaurant – but using clay dug up from the Thames estuary nearby for local authenticity. The team’s vibrant creation for the new Loughton restaurant won a Restaurant & Bar Design Award, which turned out to be the first of many, with STAC’s designs for Nando’s in Peckham, Harrogate and Swindon also winning awards.
Croydon’s Nando’s home includes a wall of terracotta ridge tiles. Courtesy Of Stac
Thrush’s personal favourite of the portfolio so far is the Nando’s in Croydon. ‘We were given this plain retail box on a retail park and we had to create something that was a destination and felt special,’ he explains. ‘The solution was to take ordinary materials and use them in extraordinary ways, so we had a 20m-long wall made with regular terracotta Victorian ridge tiles, used vertically as cladding, plus a light sculpture running through the middle of the restaurant like a spine.’ The key, he says, is to take something ordinary and everyday and transform it into something extraordinary.
‘I like to be quite clever with the budget; some designers might specify an expensive tile but only be able to use a little. I’d rather find an everyday material that’s a fraction of the cost per square metre and cut it up or do something different and creative with it,’ says Thrush.
The chain’s Peckham restaurant uses bright yellow windowsill tile panels to draw visitors in, while old shutters were used in Glasgow. Courtesy Of Stac
So, at Peckham, for example, he created an entire arched infrastructure of wooden blocks within the box of the restaurant, creating the illusion of walking in through a railway-arch style tunnel, before leading customers through to the back of the restaurant where they are greeted with a bright wall clad in glossy, off-the-shelf yellow windowsill tiles. Other unusual material choices include using the corrugated sheeting used for cheap roofing; in the Greenwich restaurant he cut it into small pieces with a CNC cutter and using them to clad a curved wall, with the shapes changing slowly as the wall progresses.
Perhaps the most surprising is the cork ceiling in Nando’s in Soho. The restaurant company has a policy of supporting young South African musicians by facilitating collaborations with established UK artists. As part of this programme, they wanted to include a recording studio in the restaurant – and STAC was tasked with making it unique. ‘We took one of these songs and used a piece of equipment that generated the sound waves into a visible wave, then put Nando’s peri peri salt on a platform and used that sound wave to generate a pattern. This informed a shape that was then sculpted out of a highly sustainable cork block,’ explains Thrush. The cork was chosen because of its Portuguese heritage that fitted in with Nando’s Portuguese-style food, as well as its environmental credentials. ‘We found a cork material that didn’t have any chemicals or binding agents but was simply compressed under high pressure and heat, and we used a CNC machine to cut out the sculptural shapes and forms.
Sometimes our work definitely blurs the boundaries between interior design, architecture and art.’
