Boychik

Boychik is a Mediterranean restaurant in Aurora, Colorado, inside Stanley Marketplace on the Denver-Aurora line. It took over 1,271 square feet of front-of-house space built for an industrial-modern chicken restaurant. We took our inspiration from Tel Aviv and the Israeli coastline and set out to design an interior that feels light, bright, airy and coastal.

That was a long way from where the building started. Stanley Marketplace is the old Stanley Aviation factory, which built ejection seats for jet aircraft, and the rest of the marketplace still leans hard into that history. The walls are cinder block. Steel beams run across the ceiling and come up out of the floor. Everything was hard lines and hard architecture.

So we softened it. We lined the room with arches, rounded the bar and the hood, and used matte finishes on the walls so light wouldn't bounce harshly around the space. The steel got painted in our creamy off-white until it all but disappears.

The last problem was the ceiling, where all the HVAC and mechanical is exposed. We hung woven pendants low enough to meet the beams. They pull the whole visual ceiling down with them, so your eye stays in the room instead of on the ductwork.