Hutong

Hutong is the acclaimed Northern Chinese restaurant occupying the 33rd floor of The Shard, London, a dramatic high-altitude setting with views across the capital and an interior aesthetic rooted in richly lacquered, red-and-dark-timber materiality. Make Bespoke Studio's partners supplied bespoke furniture and joinery for this striking space, with pieces developed to hold their own within one of London's most atmospheric dining rooms.

Custom table bases, seating and decorative screens were among the elements manufactured, each finished to complement the restaurant's deep colour palette and layered surfaces. The commission required careful attention to both the visual language of the scheme and the practical demands of a high-volume, high-profile restaurant environment.

Hutong NYC, designed by Robert Angell, is a depiction of Chinese modernisation and elegance with a twist of western culture — a streamlined modern concept taking inspiration from the Art Deco movement. It was a design style well known and prevalent in New York, but also — less commonly — an architectural style of its own in China, known as Shanghai Art Deco. The concept reflects and interprets these two dynamic and timeless styles into a single glamorous design. There are three main interior elements that our partners produced pieces for: the restaurant, the bar, and the private dining rooms.

The material vocabulary in each room runs to deep red lacquer, blackened brass, mottled green stone and ribbon-grained dark timbers — a register that reads as Shanghai-1930s when viewed through the New York lens, and as classic Art Deco when read the other way. Detailing across the joinery package was developed to hold the line between the two references without committing fully to either, so each element could be read in either direction depending on its setting.

Our partners produced banquette seating, bar joinery and decorative screen work across the three rooms, finished to support the carefully layered palette of the scheme. Each piece was sampled and signed off against the design team’s reference imagery before going into production.