Correa & Milá’s Restaurants #Alfonso Milá #Federico Correa

Federico Correa and Alfonso Milá followed Ernesto Nathan Rogers’ motto “from the spoon to the city” and faced interior design and product design as a part of architecture. Several times, they designed new furniture and lighting because they couldn’t find any suitable piece for a specific interior.

In 1961 they designed the Reno Restaurant in Barcelona, which soon became a symbol of contemporary luxury and comfort. They designed the tables and chairs for these premises using a contemporary approach into the traditional furniture. They wanted to use a lamp by the Milanese architect Ignazio Gardella but it wasn’t available. So they asked him for permission to design a reproduction, a lamp with spherical shades that produces a soft illumination. In 1962 they designed a bar-restaurant and a club for the recently opened headquarters of the Architects Association of Catalonia. They used there a set of Barceloneta chairs, originally designed for Coderch’s homonymous building, and some floor lamps by Miguel Milá, Alfonso Milá’s brother and their regular partner for product design.

The Flash Flash Restaurant, opened in 1970, was designed in a completely different way. They introduced a Pop gesture in a completely white interior with also white furniture. On the white walls, there is by a series of pictures of a woman with a camera by the photographer Leopoldo Pomés. The cameras’ flashes are also the actual lighting of the interior. Four years later, in a small restaurant called Il Giardinetto, they took the figurative decoration a step further. They turned the columns into streamlined trees that spread their leaves over the ceiling in a complete trompe-l’oeil that covered every surface. The furniture that they chose for the different levels of the restaurant also recall the garden that the restaurant was named after.