Suba Restaurant
New York, New York
Andre Kikoski Architect, PLLC

Digging below the surface (and into the cellar) of an old tenement to create a hip new place to be seen

© Peter Aaron/Esto

For more photos click on 'photos & drawings' above. To see the people and products behind this project click on 'people & products.'

By Elizabeth Harrison Kubany

When he first saw the 1909 tenement building that is now Suba’s home, New York City architect Andre Kikoski needed to use all his imagination to envision what might be.

A childhood friend, attorney-turned-real-estate-entrepreneur Whitney Quillen, had purchased the property and wanted Kikoski to transform it into a restaurant.

Kikoski slipped the restaurant within the brick shell of the tenement, designing a ground-level lounge as a dark and intimate space with a bar crafted of walnut and industrial metal and fitted with sleek furniture that he designed. The lounge, though, turns out to be just one of Suba’s three main spaces, a teaser for what is hidden below.

Behind the bar, patrons descend a staircase of stainless-steel bar grating suspended over an 18-foot-long illuminated reflecting pool. The staircase is a microcosm of the entire restaurant: raw, industrial, and meticulously detailed. The architect even measured the width of his wife’s Manolo Blahnik stilettos so the stair’s metal grating would be tight enough to prevent fashionistas from losing their heels as they walk up or down.

At the bottom of the stair, a small bridge leads to the dining "grotto," the Lower East Side’s answer to the Four Seasons Pool Room—albeit somewhat grungier and turned inside out. Instead of dining tables surrounding a pool, the water at Suba (7,000 gallons of it) surrounds the tables. Fifty underwater lights (designed by Anne Kale Associates, the firm that relit the Four Seasons’ pool) shine through the gently moving water to cast shimmering ripples of light across the room’s exposed brick walls and ceiling vaults.

Half a level below the grotto, in a space excavated from what had been the rear yard, is the skylight lounge—ironically, the only room in the restaurant with views to the sky. Although not large, the lounge has 14-foot ceilings and graceful proportions, which give it an expansive feel.

To create this subterranean playground required expensive preparation. In fact, almost three quarters of the project’s budget went for excavation, structural design, and mechanical/electrical/plumbing work. Workers removed more than 8 feet of earth for the grotto and 10 feet for the skylight lounge. They inserted steel beams throughout the building and tied these new members to the existing structure.

While most of Suba is new—including its systems, spaces, and structure—Kikoski retained the old building’s brick fabric to create a seamless blending of past and present. Even when he had to move a wall, he reused the old brick as much as possible. To embellish this simple materials palette, he added a few contemporary flourishes, such as tinted concrete floors polished with automotive wax and "Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera" colors on a few of the surfaces in the skylight lounge.

See the November 2002 issue of Architectural Record for full coverage of this project.

Formal name of Project:
Suba Restaurant

Location:
New York City

Gross square footage:
4,000 sq. ft.

Total construction cost:
$1.98 million

Client:
Suba, LLC

Architect:
Andre Kikoski Architect, PLLC
137 East 56th St, 4th Floor
New York, NY 10022
212-628-4826 T
212-754-4332 F
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