Tapas Brindisa Kensington

Planting for Tapas Brindisa on Exhibition Road in South Kensington — the Spanish tapas restaurant at 7–9 Exhibition Road, designed by Applied Studio.

A boundary with no wall

Exhibition Road is pedestrianised, and the restaurant's terrace sits directly on it. That is a rare and slightly awkward condition: a place where people are eating, opening onto a public street where people are walking to the V&A, and nothing structural between the two.

Something has to draw that line, and it cannot be a fence. Planters are the instrument — they mark where the restaurant begins without enclosing it, they let the terrace stay part of the street rather than fenced off from it, and they can be moved when the operation needs them to be.

Which means the planting is doing a job before it does anything decorative. It has to be tall enough to read as an edge from a walking eye-line, and heavy enough to stay where it is put on a windy Tuesday.

Planting in the public realm

An exterior scheme on a central London street is a harder brief than an interior one, and for reasons that have nothing to do with design.

The plants sit in wind funnelled between buildings, in traffic-free but not clean air, with no irrigation and no soil beneath them, and they are within reach of several thousand people a day walking past the museums. Anything delicate, anything that needs babying, anything that looks poor for six weeks of the year is the wrong answer.

So the specification leans hard on structure and toughness: evergreen, wind-tolerant, drought-tolerant, and holding its form through the winter — because Exhibition Road does not go quiet in February. The museums are busiest when the weather is worst.

A Spanish restaurant, planted like one

The other half of the brief is that this is Brindisa, and the room has an upbeat, traditionally Spanish character with an open kitchen at the heart of it. The planting takes its cue from that rather than from a generic terrace scheme — Mediterranean in feel, evergreen, and comfortable in the reflected heat that a hard-surfaced street throws back at it in summer.

It is the same instinct behind the planting at Legado in Shoreditch: choose plants that live outdoors where the food comes from, and the room and the terrace agree with each other without anybody having to say so.

Credits

Client: Brindisa
Design: Applied Studio
Planting: Plant Drop

Plant consultant: Dom Butler