Walk into Ambassadors Clubhouse on lower Madison Avenue, and you feel like you’re stepping foot onto a movie set. Located on the ground floor of a new-build, glass-and-concrete office building, the restaurant’s minimalist exterior conceals a maximalist interior. The entire space is aglow.
Sam Hosker of North End Design works with London’s JKS Restaurants to choreograph its multiple properties. Here, he explains how he and JKS co-founder Karam Sethi transform a nondescript box into a white-hot destination.
Everyone loves natural light–until they don’t.
ACH’s high-ceilinged location is great if you want a sunlit lobby. But what about an intimate, sensual restaurant?
To start, counterintuitively, North End lowered the ceilings, bringing the room to scale. Then, to minimize the outside world, they dropped drapes from the window tops, while erecting leaden-glass partitions behind the banquettes, creating a letterbox view of New York.
“You notice the movement of the street, but you’re away from the hustle and bustle,” Hosker says, “You can lose yourself, especially during lunch.”
No overhead spot lights—ever.
Of the 500 lightbulbs and yards upon yards of LED lighting strips that ACH uses, all are set relatively low, both in terms of wattage and where the fixtures sources are situated. “We stick to our founding principles of low level (table lights and small booth lights) and mid level (wall lights and floor lamps) to create most of the ambience alongside concealed LEDs,” says Hosker. Any overhead lighting is strictly decorative.
“Diners shouldn’t notice the lighting,” he says. “If they do, that usually means they’re picking up on things that annoy them. There is nothing more annoying than a pin light peering down on your table.”
Quality lighting should complement the diner.
Ever walk into a restaurant restroom and think to yourself, “I look good!” That’s because strategically positioned light sources are set at face level—to the sides of the mirror or just above it, projecting an even, photographer’s-like glow on your face. Overhead lights can make you look shadowy, even ghoulish.
The mirror, itself, also matters. “We never use a clear mirror that you’d use in your house,” says Hosker. “We always want a bit of a gold or copper tone to it.”
Trust the human touch.
Any restaurant with windows contends with daylight, which constantly changes, hour to hour, month to month.
Two options: Timers and censors or human touch. Hosker prefers the latter.
“If a space is well managed, only one or two people should touch the lighting. They should adjust it throughout the day. Good dimmers use a 30-second transition so the lighting shift is never abrupt.”
If it feels like JKS has this down to a formula, it’s because they do. They operate nearly 30 restaurants worldwide, including an Ambassadors Clubhouse in London, along with the Michelin-starred Gymkhana in both London and Las Vegas.
