Restaurang Pava – Art Deco restaurant and cocktail bar in Stockholm

The vision: something not typically Swedish

The owners wanted Art Deco, but with a modern and eclectic touch. The goal was to create something not typically Swedish, something that had not been seen or done before in Stockholm. The space was completely raw when we started, and we had seven months to turn it into a finished restaurant.

One of the most important factors was the contractor, Paulak AB, who put up with my crazy ideas and my daily changes. On a restaurant project with that schedule, the interior designer and the builders have to be able to trust each other, every single day.

The de Gournay wallpaper set the tone

What set the tone for the whole restaurant was the wallpaper from de Gournay. I designed and coloured it myself, and it became the foundation for the colour scheme in the rest of the space: copper, gold, petrol blue and muted pinks that return in the velvet, the brass and the light.

A hand-painted wallpaper at that scale becomes a work of art in the room. Once it was decided, every other choice – textiles, chairs, lighting – could be tested against it.

Bar and dining room: two spaces in one

It was important to create two different spaces in the same room, with invisible dividers: one for dining and one for the bar. Guests should be able to come for different occasions and discover new places depending on where in the restaurant they sit.

For the bar I went for a classic Art Deco design, with tube-shaped tiles wrapping both the walls and the bar itself. In the dining room this softens into tube-shaped wainscotting on the walls instead. The floor is black and white marble in a checkerboard pattern, and the tables have marble tops.

The space takes a lot of people without feeling crowded, whether you choose a large table in the dining room or a seat at the bar.

Lighting: LED meets carbon filament

It was important to me to mix modern and classic lighting throughout the restaurant, where LED meets carbon filament. RGB lights around the windows and dimmable LED lights on the walls let the mood change as the evening goes on.

For the eclectic side I brought in three Moreno chandeliers from 1970 and alabaster wall lamps from the 1920s. The glass chandeliers come from Barovier & Toso. Old and new light meet in the same room, just like the rest of the interior.

The restroom: an Art Deco cosmos of its own

We also wanted to create a completely different room for the restroom. The inspiration came from a German washbasin from 1920. The walls are covered in Hackney’s Cosmos wallpaper, and with disco balls in the ceiling I could create my own Art Deco cosmos.

On top of that you find the classic Art Deco elements throughout the restaurant: the black and white marble floor, palm trees, photo art and a stained-glass windbreak.

Materials from around the world, in the middle of the pandemic

The challenge was that everything had to be bespoke. Stockholm is not very large, so I had to search the whole world: tube-shaped wainscotting from the far north of Sweden, wall tiles from Turkey, marble for the floor and table tops from Italy, and finds from auction houses in every corner – Auctionnet among them. All on a tight schedule at the height of the pandemic, with the aftermath of the Suez Canal blockage still in the supply chain.

The suppliers included de Gournay (wallpaper), Homeline (furniture), Vinlagring (wine fridge), Barovier & Toso (glass chandeliers), DM SRL (marble floor and table tops), Destone (tiles) and Listspecialisten (wainscotting).

The result came out better than I had imagined. I feel we managed to create an interesting and zestful interior in an otherwise grey and boxy setting – a place of escapism, where you leave your everyday life at the door. The restaurant was entered in the Restaurant & Bar Design Awards 2023.

One of the first people to see the finished restaurant described it as entering the world of Alice in Wonderland.