92 Photos: Studio DADO INTERIOR COMMENTARY When talking about the modern cruise experience, it is almost impossible not to mention dining. – and it’s a very different conversation than we were having even just 10 years ago. On older ships, there were few dining venues, so everyone had pretty much the same experience, often with assigned seating each night. However, the latest ships have so many dining choices that guests are able to fully customise what, when and where they eat. At the heart of this highly personalised experience is the symbiotic relationship between design and food. Studio DADO is generally known for cruise work, but our portfolio includes as many restaurants as any other type of space. For a land-based resort project, we might design three or four restaurants at most but on a ship we may design 10 venues, each with a completely different cuisine and ambience. Our mission is to figure out how to transform these restaurants into destinations – to make them thematic without turning them into theme parks, high design without being uncomfortable. We design our spaces without ‘bad’ seats, so that even if someone orders the exact same meal every time they visit, they can have a completely different, but always enjoyable, dining experience within the same space. Often, people assume that the best seats are next to the windows and that might be true on land, but it is not necessarily the case in the middle of the ocean at night when there’s not much to see other than your own reflection. That’s why we consider sight lines and incorporate art, custom lighting, texture and signature furniture that can be viewed from every vantage point. In venues that are open for more than just dinner, such as the Compass Rose onboard Regent Seven Seas Cruises’ new Seven Seas Grandeur, we create transformative designs to ensure they have a different atmosphere at noon than they do in the evening. We spend a great deal of time refining the details of our spaces, which is a discipline honed by years of cruise ship work. Every surface and piece of furniture is carefully planned, all the way down to the way the chairs slide beneath the tables. On some ships, everything is custom made to ensure that we are telling the story of the food and the space. Our team works with fabric designers, artists and local craftspeople and makers to make sure that the restaurants we design By Yohandel Ruiz, Studio DADO Designers must consider everything from sight lines to furniture, lighting and back-of-house operations to create comfortable, aesthetically pleasing restaurants that operate smoothly and deliver memorable moments for cruise guests Creating transcendent dining experiences at sea Oceania Vista’s Grand Dining Room is modelled on Europe’s finest conservatories, with a hydrangea chandelier, parquet floors, and dimensional wall murals
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