LOFT PROJECT ETAGI, St Petersburg, Russia
Conceptual. Loft. Design. Young. Smart. Concentrating on what's vital and leaving out what's not. Sounds Russian? To us, now, yes! That's probably one of the coolest places in StPete and in Russia (OK, there are SOME places that pretend to be cool... but there's too much PR noise around and too much money invested and too many expensive things inside... not really our thing!).
The former bread factory in the downtown, Loft Project Etagi now hosts 5 levels of galleries, a designer store, a bookstore, a cafe, a bar and a hostel. The interior design combines old partially broken tiles, trampled out staires and old industrial luminaires with the furniture of Charles and Ray Eames and Magis, solid wooden floors and contemporary materials.
The canteen/cafe called Green Room is a space lit by daylight coming from big windows (also there's a terrace) so green spotlights with green barndoors are just adding to this ambient lighting effect. The same spotlights are used throughout the place together with fluo tubes and suspended luminaires. Effect lighting is created by a bunch of incandescent lamps and...
... some decorative chandeliers (the Backstage boutique selling Russian and Baltic designers, I'm the regular! :)
To top it all literally, the LoftWineBar with wine (no surprise!) and designer luminaires over the bar counter as well as white pendants and white floor lamps - note also the fittings in the floor levels used decoratively and for orientation during movie nights. One of our favourite places in the city!
The White Hall gallery space on the ground floor was all occupied by big cages with dogs and cats waiting for their new owners - a charity event organized by Etagi - and we could not very well focus on the lighting... when those eyes were looking at us... we'd take them all!!!
The canteen/cafe called Green Room is a space lit by daylight coming from big windows (also there's a terrace) so green spotlights with green barndoors are just adding to this ambient lighting effect. The same spotlights are used throughout the place together with fluo tubes and suspended luminaires. Effect lighting is created by a bunch of incandescent lamps and...
... some decorative chandeliers (the Backstage boutique selling Russian and Baltic designers, I'm the regular! :)
To top it all literally, the LoftWineBar with wine (no surprise!) and designer luminaires over the bar counter as well as white pendants and white floor lamps - note also the fittings in the floor levels used decoratively and for orientation during movie nights. One of our favourite places in the city!
The White Hall gallery space on the ground floor was all occupied by big cages with dogs and cats waiting for their new owners - a charity event organized by Etagi - and we could not very well focus on the lighting... when those eyes were looking at us... we'd take them all!!!
Also above right - one of the galleries in place of a former storage, with low ceiling height so the fluo tube rows are just enough for lighting it up.
The staires are left unchanged and decorated with the help of posters of the forthcoming events, orientation signs and old fluo tubes mounted either vertically or horizontally.
For dessert, the room that shocked me: the toilet walls are made of semi-opaque and semi-transparent thin plastic which you can encounter in green houses. So you can actually see through it! And the scarce lighting provides more than enough visibility... Please turn off the light! :) :)
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