Popo dumplings is a newly created food offer which sits in a freestanding kiosk at Auckland International Airport’s Airside food court. The name derives from the Chinese word for “Grandmother”, referencing the traditional, hand-made nature of the cuisine. The intention was to produce handmade dumplings and noodle dishes prepared fresh on site to serve customers seated at the bar or in nearby common-area seating. The target market is both European and Asian but the kiosk particularly targets travellers from the East who struggle to find familiar food, such as spicy, savoury breakfast dishes.

We deliberately kept the palate quite neutral and wanted to create more of a traditional, old-style Chinese restaurant feel rather than a modern “Chinese take-away” look. Colours were limited to earth-tones, coppers, browns and soft pinks to suggest rock salt. Counter faces feature aged copper and antique-looking tiles in brown, pink and bone tones. We created a new logo in English and Mandarin with the Chinese characters set on a red square.
We completely prefabricated the kiosk mainly using a steel frame for the higher areas for ease of disassembly and transport. The cabinet carcasses are made of timber but also made into several parts for portability.

Silk Road is a restaurant at Auckland International airport landside food court serving a variety of Asian cuisines.
As part of the refurbishment the airport required a change of menu to focus on Thai food, although Chinese and Indonesian food is also served, therefore the design needed to reflect this combination of influences.
We started by considering the overall “Look and feel” of the newly formatted restaurant and, because the intention was not to reflect only one cuisine, we decided to make it look like a late-colonial merchant house restaurant, as is common throughout Asia.

We wanted to portray this pan-Asian theme without listing the various types of cuisine that were offered so we designed and commissioned wall murals of an Asian street theme, which could be interpreted as being from any food market street in different parts of Asia. The interior was deliberately dark-finished with a number of random light fittings hanging from the ceiling. This ceiling was panelled to look like the underside of a merchant-house floor. The front of the counter is covered in genuine Chinese antique bricks, each of them being well over a hundred years old. The ceiling is painted in brown rust paint. Neon street-food signs complete the look.

Our long-standing clients, Kiwi Discovery Ltd, approached us to do a new freestanding store in Auckland International Airport‘s landslide farewell zone – more commonly known as the food court. The 85 square metre site needed to not only act as a sushi store, but also a large commercial kitchen in which the majority of the Hayama food is made to service a number of the chain’s outlets throughout the airport complex. This involved installation of some very large commercial range-hood extract equipment into the ceiling space. Our clients wanted us to continue with their previously established finishes palette of light timber and their existing signage and colour scheme to give a contemporary feel but also to reflect nature of their natural and traditional Japanese products on offer.

The site itself was especially difficult as, in addition to being very small for the kitchen and refrigeration equipment required, there were very few of the necessary services on site due to the fact it was previously a coffee kiosk. We had to include a significant amount of plumbing, electrical, and mechanical systems into the tenancy, none of which could be supported from the ceiling. To do this, we had to effectively build a small building within the tenancy to house all of the plant. We also wanted to hide the large bulk of the commercial kitchen so that the building would not appear to be a solid block. We did so by wrapping the food offer around the corner and creating some openings into the kitchen and the sushi preparation space so that the process of on-site sushi making was visible and could be appreciated by customers in the food court.

Our clients wanted Hayama’s Airside outlet to reflect the delivery and branding of the other natural looking restaurants throughout Auckland International airport. The airports own Design Team insisted that once travellers passed through customs and were effectively “on holiday”, and that the dining experience should be quite different so travellers were more likely to relax, grab something to drink and have a less rushed dining experience. The tenancy presented a number of challenges as there was really only one solid wall, which was to the rear of the site where the commercial kitchen was to be placed.

Space was extremely limited, so we chose to only add high level, freestanding, communal tables to minimise the seating area and allow customers somewhere to put their wheelie bags while dining. In addition, we created some dining height seating around the column with an authentic Japanese feel created by the use of hanging cushions and a traditional Japanese teapot display above. We used scalloped tiles on the columns and elsewhere in the tenancy as a nod towards the predominant use of seafood in the menu. The site was very hard to identify from a distance without any exterior walls, so we persuaded the airport to allow us to add signage onto the front of an existing column, although they insisted that this could not actually touch the column apart from some minimal fixings.

Halong bay is a new concept which we developed for our clients as they expand their Asian food offer to include a new Vietnamese category. The name derives from the popular and beautiful Halong Bay area, which is a huge tourist attraction. The tenancy posed several design challenges: to start, it is a very narrow site which is sandwiched between our clients own Hayama Japanese restaurant and a large burger tenancy next door.

Tables are shared with planter dividers to enable more than one party to occupy them, as space was extremely limited. We sought to decorate the large flat wall we were presented with by neighbours by adding some light-box signs that were reminiscent of the sort of street market and food store signage typical of Vietnam’s cities. We did the graphics for these ourselves. Neon was used to also reference Asian food store signage in general.