Monmono Blue Restaurant and Gallery by Alvan Suen Wins the Silver A' Design Award in Interior Space and Exhibition Design

Alvan Suen honored for interior space and exhibition design by the international grand jury of the 2022 - 2023 A' Design Award & Competition

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

COMO, Italy, April 20, 2023 /DesignNewswire/ Monmono Blue Restaurant and Gallery by Alvan Suen, designed for The Montage Group Limited, has been granted the Silver A' Design Award in the Interior Space and Exhibition Design category, A' Design Award & Competition has announced. The recognition forms part of the 2022 - 2023 A' Design Award & Competition and was reached through blind peer review by an international grand jury panel of established academics, design professionals and press members, who scored anonymized entries against predetermined criteria.

About the Silver A' Design Award

The Silver A' Design Award celebrates top-tier designs that embody excellence and innovation. This award acknowledges creations that are not only aesthetically pleasing but also highly functional, reflecting the designer's deep understanding and skill. Silver A' Design Award recipients are recognized for their contribution to raising industry standards and advancing the practice of design. Their work often incorporates original innovations and elicits a strong emotional response, making a notable impact on the improvement of everyday life.

More About Monmono Blue Restaurant and Gallery

Monmono Blue is a restaurant and gallery interior in Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong. The whole space is finished in a single blue tone, creating a monochrome setting for art. Four zones recall a casino, a hotel, a retail store and a piazza, and a vintage car is placed with part of the body out of view. Contrast is built with gloss and matt textures and with lighting at 6000K, because warmer light would make the blue look green. Most elements were prefabricated and installed on site. The interior covers 1464 square feet and seats 50 guests.

About Alvan Suen

Alvan Suen is the Managing Director and founder of Nameless Hong Kong Limited, graduated from the University of Hong Kong with a Bachelor of Art in Architectural Studies. Besides design and running projects, he had been doing research and teaching in the University of Hong Kong as well; his researches and works on the environmental design in the HKU explore the problem of microclimate in the dense cities, solutions for reducing energy consumption in summer through design forms by using air pressure and natural ventilation, reactivating the alleyways between buildings in HK and climate-responsive high-rise residential building design.

Award Record

Alvan Suen is a winner of 6 A' Design Awards, including this recognition. The awards span the editions from 2018 - 2019 to 2022 - 2023 of the A' Design Award & Competition.

About the A' Interior Space, Retail and Exhibition Design Award

The A' Interior Design Award is an international interior design competition recognizing good interior designs by interior designers and architects worldwide. The competition is organized within the A' Design Award & Competition and is open to interior designers, interior architects, architects and decorators from all countries. Entries typically include residential interiors, restaurants, hotels, offices, galleries and retail stores. Awarded interior designs are published at https://designers.org/design-category/interior

About A' Design Award & Competition

A' Design Award & Competition is an international, juried design accolade organized annually since 2008. The competition is open to entries from all countries. The A' Design Award has a philanthropic mission to advance society through good design by recognizing and promoting superior products, projects and services that benefit society, and by creating a global awareness and appreciation for good design practices and principles. Entries are peer reviewed and anonymously evaluated by an international grand jury panel of established academics, design professionals and press members against predetermined criteria such as functionality, ergonomics, engineering, presentation, innovation, usability, sustainability and technology, with score normalization applied to remove biases. Awards are conferred at Platinum, Gold, Silver, Bronze and Iron levels. The A' Design Prize granted to eligible laureates includes the award trophy, the certificate of design excellence, the hardcover yearbook, a lifetime license to use the A' Design Award winner logo, exhibition of awarded works, an invitation to the gala night and award ceremony in Italy, inclusion in the World Design Rankings and Designer Rankings, and public relations and publicity services. Registration, the upload of a work and the preliminary score are free of charge, and Professional and Digital Edition laureates are not contractually obliged to pay further fees to claim the A' Design Prize. Further information is available at https://competition.adesignaward.com

Press Resources

Winner Page: https://designers.org/146288
A' Design Award Page: https://competition.adesignaward.com/146288
Media Showcase: https://www.designnewsroom.com/!146288
Laureate Profile: https://designers.org/d/243407
Further Information from the Laureate: https://www.montagegroup.co/monmono

Media Contact

Giulia Ferrari, Press Office
Designers.Org
Via Leone Leoni 32, 22100 Como, Italy
press@designers.org
+39 031 4491953

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Fact Sheet

The Work

Project: Monmono Blue Restaurant and Gallery
Function: Restaurant and Gallery
Category: Interior Space and Exhibition Design
Discipline: Spatial Design
Industry: Architecture and Packaging & Retail
Colors: Black, Midnight Blue, Dark Slate Gray and Dim Gray
Images: 5
Client: The Montage Group Limited

The Recognition

Laureate: Alvan Suen
Country: Hong Kong (China)
Recognition: Silver A' Design Award
Edition: 2022 - 2023
Design ID: #146288

Credits

Image Credits: Photographer: Yui Zhu

Design Details

Unique Properties: Monmono is a restaurant, a gallery, and an art piece. With the brand core of montage, monochrome and monogram, the project aims to position itself as an urban art insertion expressing its obsession with monochrome. The entire shop is fully finished in Blue, offering people a novel and surreal feeling of being in the world of art. The implication of blue in a realistic vintage design with a surreal monochrome environment helps with showing more design details in a mysterious, calm and elegant ambiance so as to emphasize the playfulness of monochrome design.
Inspiration: The idea of monochrome is inspired by architectural study models, the beauty of a simple scale pure white object, and the beginning of all projects. What if the city is built with only one color? The buildings, the windows, doors, canopies, vehicles, streetlamps, furniture, the ground and the sky, the entire world is in one color, how interesting would it be? However, it would be an impossible project. Looking at the beautiful city of Hong Kong, which is busy, complex and colorful, what if there is a mass of one single color is inserted into the urban context?
Research: The Monmono project is also a huge art project that aims to insert each single-color restaurant into different parts of the city, using monochrome as a very understandable and compelling theme, using restaurants as a high-traffic daily business, to provide a very unique platform for the local artists to exchange ideas and to have their own exhibition. The strong brand identity has successfully attracted a lot of people to visit and get to know more about monochrome as an art form as well as the artists' works. The artwork to be exhibited in Monmono has to be in monochrome style while the artist's own style is maintained.
Challenge: For styles like industrial, contrast can be made easily by the mixture of concrete, steel, wood and an open ceiling. When it comes to monochrome style, creating contrast simply by use of color is not an option, the use of different textures of materials such as gloss and matt, the use of lighting, the use of dark and bright, etc, have become extra important in this project. Also, the choices of material will also be limited, for example, it is a huge challenge in terms of sourcing of materials for glass, paint, leather, terrazzo and curtain with similar colors, it deeply relies on the products and stock of the material suppliers.
Realization and Technology: The light temperature of 6000K is rarely used in restaurants, but it is used in this case since the lighting of 4000K or below will green out the blue space. Most of the construction elements are pre-fabricated in the factory and installed on-site, to ensure a precise and fine finishing and an efficient workflow. Some of the materials such as terrazzo for the tables are custom-made due to the color tone. In order to make sure the final result is ideal and everything works and fits, the project was mainly created on the computer; rendering is heavily used for testing different materials and calculating lux as well as color temperature for all lighting throughout the entire design process.
Operation and Interaction: The layout has been divided into 4 sections, private room (Hotel), semi-private room (Retail), high stool table (Casino) and main dining area (Piazza), the variety of seating provided diversity to the space, meanwhile providing clear zoning for operation. The main dining area was centered in the middle of two doors located on each side of the façade; two main hallways were separated by a series of dining tables in the middle, which can be flexibly arranged to cater to different groups of people. Each side of the main dining area and independent rooms has its own service sideboard, designed to be hidden in the scenes with good accessibility for operation flow.
Project Duration and Location: The project is located in Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong. The design was started in January 2022 and the construction was finished in Aoril 2022.
Specifications: Total Area: 1464 sq.ft. Capacity: 50
Keywords: Monochrome, Regal Blue, Vintage, Piazza, America, Casino, French, Retail, British, Hotel, Rome, Hall, Classic Car, Gallery, Surrealism