Juniper: A Northern Italian restaurant in a former Austin bottling plant
RestaurantAustin, TexasPublished Updated
Juniper is a Northern Italian restaurant inside a shuttered bottling plant on Austin’s east side, at Cesar Chavez and Pedernales in the Holly neighborhood. It was Cravotta Interiors’ first restaurant commission, designed with Sanders Architecture over a yearlong conversion.
The brief
The guiding idea was a black box theater. The open kitchen is the stage, the dining room is the audience, and the architecture holds attention without competing for it. Chef Nicholas Yanes tapped Chris Sanders of Sanders Architecture and Mark Cravotta to make the project real.
Scope
Full restaurant interior inside an existing industrial building: bar, dining room, private dining room, restrooms, custom lighting, furniture and art commissions.
The design
The building gave the project its bones: ceilings of about eighteen feet in the dining room, with exposed wood joists and concrete beams.
The walnut bar was made by hand, with a plaster wave rising above it that gives the bar wall a sculptural presence. The lighting throughout, papier-mâché forms over hand-forged bronze cages, was designed by Cravotta. One wall is paneled wood, and an artist was commissioned to paint a juniper tree across its full length.
The private dining room holds a table and chairs Cravotta designed, with work by artist America Martin.
The restrooms were treated as rooms of their own. Each non-gendered restroom has a different mirror, and the lighting is dim and soft. The Austin Chronicle singled them out in a 2017 piece on restaurant restrooms.
Texas Architect reviewed the restaurant as a space where culinary drama takes center stage. The Architect’s Newspaper, the Austin American-Statesman and Wallpaper* also covered it.
- Collaborators
- Architect: Sanders Architecture (Chris Sanders). Chef: Nicholas Yanes. Photography (Texas Architect): Ryann Ford.
- Materials and makers
- Lighting, private dining table and chairs designed by Cravotta Interiors. Art: America Martin.
- Press
- Austin American-Statesman, September 2016. The Architect’s Newspaper, December 2016. Texas Architect, January 2017. The Austin Chronicle, May 2017. Wallpaper*.