LAVO Ristorante sits within The BoTree Hotel on Welbeck Street, with interiors by Concrete Amsterdam. The venue runs across two floors: a ground floor dining room with a fireside terrace, bright with natural light, and a lower ground floor bar area with settings for private dining. The design draws on an Italian register — wood-panelled ceilings, exposed brickwork, a living wall and placed olive trees — with ribbed recycled Buxkin leather and hand-painted details by Lizzi Porter contributing to the material story.
Our commission covered all upholstered seating across both floors: fitted banquettes in straight and curved runs, booth seating, bench seating for the bar zone, and additional fitted elements on the lower ground floor. Every piece was designed for this space — proportions set against the architecture, foam specifications developed for all-day restaurant use, stitch details co-ordinated with the level of craft visible in the surrounding joinery.
The ground floor banquettes were developed to integrate with the wood-panelled wall system rather than sit in front of it. The back profiles are recessed into the panelling, so the seating reads as part of the room's architecture. Runs follow the geometry of the space in both straight and curved configurations. Ribbed Buxkin leather is used for the banquettes; booth seating combines leather and a two-tone fabric. Stitch details across both were matched to the quality of finish in the surrounding joinery, and bench seating for the bar zone follows the same specification.
The lower ground floor is lower-lit, more contained, with a distinct character to the dining room above. The brief for this level emphasised privacy and enclosure: booths with enough depth to give each setting a degree of separation from the room. Upholstery is consistent with the ground floor, tuned to the atmosphere of the space. Fitted seating runs through the bar area and into the circulation zones to ensure the vocabulary carries through the full extent of the lower level.
Nothing at LAVO was adapted from a standard range. Each piece was drawn from scratch for this restaurant and its specific geometry, with foam specifications, fabric selections and stitch patterns all developed in direct collaboration with Concrete Amsterdam's design team. Ribbed leather performs well in high-contact zones and holds its form over years of continuous use. The stitch detail is the kind of thing that reads better in person than in photographs — precise, consistent, and present on every piece.