Ensue

I visited Chef Christopher Kostow in the spring of 2018 at his farm in St. Helena, CA. During our initial design briefing conversation for Ensue, he asked me “what is your definition of luxury?”. My response was that, to me, emotion evokes the greatest sense of luxury, as identifying luxury itself is a very deep and personal response to something. Chef Kostow then pointed to a tree in his farm and told me that that was his luxury. At that moment, I made up my mind that in the process of designing his restaurant I was going bring an unpretentious naturalism into the urban landscape of Shenzhen that would be emotive, yet effortless. Inspired by the aesthetics of wabi-sabi, Chef Kostow represents his cuisine in the most simple form, but with the most intricate philosophy. In the design mechanism of Ensue, I aim to find a new emotional representation of luxury, achieved through unifying local vernacular, with contemporary ideas. A fusion of eastern ideas and philosophy, with western execution will create a space that evokes a new sense of style and elegance. This concept, executed with a wabi-sabi aesthetic that celebrates transience and imperfection, cohesively suggests “a Buddhist teaching of the three marks of existence, specifically impermanence, suffering and emptiness or absence of self-nature.” – Leonard Koren. Furthermore, the space embodies an interesting interaction between the ideas of fire and ice; two sensory, visual and conceptually jarring circumstances, that are unified in a way to create a calming sense of balance.