pistachio ceilings soften an industrial-chic restaurant in melbourne

What I adore about TRUNK-- the melbourne restaurant that I just discovered from an astonishingly gorgeous blog with a pitch-perfect design sensibility that I also just discovered (lark about) -- is that it marries

THIS aesthetic (fundamentally, that of the 19th c. draftsman's study, an aesthetic vocabulary that we sons and daughters of architects, many of us anyway, speak fluently...)



with THIS...


or rather, a hint of this....



While Trunk is clearly leaning in the Robin Standefer and Stephen Alesch direction, with those dark dark floors and lots of dark shelves and dark tables and industrial lines everywhere, that pistachio ceiling elevates the whole room into something beyond direct historical quotation.

The thing is that my design roots always take me in the direction of wonderful, pre-pre-war architectural bones, deep dark woods and slates and the rough, "quick, grab a pen-- let's sketch it out now" kind of feel. But I am also a girl who loves design elements that are a little (or a lot) more opulent, a little unabashedly pretty, a little delicate and delicious and dazzlingly chromatic.

dear Trunk, we tip our hat.

(& we may even get out our paint chips...I've got two mammoth bookshelves to paint and I'm thinking that a dull absinthe green on the wall, and glossy black for the shelves, might complement and punch up our foamy grey living room...)