For the second collaboration with Chef Kwame Onwuachi, Modellus Novus imagined a new restaurant for Washington D.C.’s Salamander Hotel that, in the legacy of Chef Kwame’s first restaurant Tatiana, honors the location’s marginalized history and culture. The restaurant finds its unique poetry through an homage to D.C.’s noted surveyor and astronomer Benjamin Banneker, a free African-American man living in a slave state in the eighteenth century, and in the spirit of the Dogon people of Mali, for which Banneker was a descendant. MN uses this lineage of astral observers to transform unexpected definitions of the night sky into an architectural language, asking guests to believe in the jubilance of the color of night.

The dual entry provides a threshold that transports guests from the Hotel and street into a distinctively dramatic atmosphere. Chain curtains obscure complete views into the restaurant and also reference Banneker’s Gunter’s chains used to measure and survey D.C.’s property. Venturing into the main dining room, various interplays emerge across architectural scales. As three recessed lit ceiling domes ground the center of the space with a cool light that alludes to moons, warm light pendants and sconces create an even plane below to read as stars. Material finishes and monolithic colors allow a dialogue of time to exist. The kitchen’s stainless steel cladding looks to the future, celebrating the machine, while the rough texture of the stately columns in the foreground harken back to antiquity. These columns also serve to break down the main dining room into smaller, intimate spaces, allowing the generous size of the restaurant to reveal itself as guests move through the space. These various moves through layout, material, and lighting ultimately seek to create a space that is both beautiful during the day and dramatic during the evening.

Photos by Naho Kubota