Eat Your Heart Out: Ham Yard Restaurant

While you might think of Soho as the busiest area in London, Ham Yard Hotel has a village feel; entering the courtyard you escape the hustle and bustle of the city.  Ham Yard Restaurant with large Crittal windows and cascading pendant ‘ostrich egg’ lights along the facade, invites you in for an exploration of culinary and interior design tastes!

The restaurant occupies a large space, so we wanted to create smaller, cosier areas. Within the restaurant, we devised clever trickery to create divisions. Contrasting tones of floorboards and wide stripes on the banquettes notionally separate eating areas, while hand embroidered fabrics, wrapped over a pole and boxed in Perspex, act as physical separations and create a flow through the restaurant.

My ‘Willow’ fabric for Christopher Farr Cloth has been used on the walls. The intricate pattern of this design is the perfect backdrop for Bruce McLean’s vivid paintings and our favourite striking hand carved sunburst mirror. The benches are upholstered in my ‘Bookends’ fabric for Christopher Farr Cloth.

The restaurant is a deep single aspect space and could have been very dark and oppressive. At the far end, lit porcelain pots glow above the banquette seats. Freud’s pots, finely inscribed dot by dot with leaf designs, have been inserted into a composition of niches, creating a long, calm glowing wall.

The pendant lights made to our specification in Firozabad provide a modern answer to a crystal chandelier. They were shipped in dozens of pieces before being re-assembled in London.

The series of miniatures are complemented across the room by a row of simply made wooden boxes with abstract black and white designs. These also double up as shelving for bottles of wine displayed every month.

If you are only joining us for a drink, take a seat in our handled bar stools in contrasting brown and orange leather and enjoy a refined cocktail on the smooth and perfectly formed, signature pewter topped bar!

In the bar area, Caribbean artist Ras Ishi’s ‘Secret Diaries’ mixed media art on rough white painted wood adds energy. The art is naïve but with a level of sophistication in the execution.