Chapel Street has never been short on places to eat. The imperative, then, is to stand out in a city awash with restaurants, wine bars and late-night spaces. Enter Studio Amaro, the Italian dining room and basement bar from Melbourne hospitality group Commune. A partner of LEIF, the venue reflects a shared appreciation for atmosphere, tactility and the way material choices shape the diner’s experience. We sat down with Studio Amaro’s interior designer, Wendy Bergman of Bergman & Co., to chat materiality, mood and the making of a memorable dining room.
Photography by Tom Blachford
The two-level restaurant and basement bar sits within Chapel Street’s busy milieu of restaurants, clubs and drinking dens. From the street, its presence is subtle — alluring and inviting, but not overdone. Step through the doors and you’ll be met with a nostalgic ’70s Italiano sensibility: chocolate cork and timber panelling, olive green accents, rusty reds and mustard corduroy banquettes. The feeling is warm but comfortably cool, casual and informal to match its menu and dining experience. From the first Sicilian olive to the last spoonful of Gianduja mousse, Studio Amaro is a world of its own.
For Bergman, the brief was not simply to design another Italian restaurant. It was to create a space that could sit comfortably within Commune’s family of venues: places with personality, looseness and a sense of story built into their bones. Studio Amaro, however, began with a different condition.
"Our challenge was to make a newly built, commercial concrete space, warm and inviting, by hiding the rigid and austere bones with a character-filled flesh that doesn’t look newly born.”
This emphasis on character became Bergman’s driving force. Rather than lean into the modernity of a commercial shell, she layered the venue with tone, texture and a spritz of theatre. The result is a dining room that feels lived-in and generous, anchored by a central bar finished with granite and mosaic tiles. Around it, booths and banquettes divide the space into more intimate pockets for eating and drinking — places to sit and settle in.
“We always ensure that, if possible, we include booths and banquettes in our designs — something to snuggle up to and create intimate areas. The experience for the diner is of utmost importance.”
Bergman’s material language is bold by design. Red-and-black-flecked granite gives the kitchen pass and bar a sense of surety and confidence. Green chequerboard flooring behind the open kitchen adds a note of play. Yellow corduroy banquettes sit against olive render, stained plywood and banded timber cladding, bringing softness to the harder machinery of hospitality service.
Glowy, cushioned and amber-edged, lighting plays a decisive role at Studio Amaro. “Lighting is key,” Bergman explains. “I want guests to sink into a nice gooey space, have an ahh moment, creating intimacy amongst the clamour. Very importantly, every light is on a dimmer.” Used as a tool to balance energy and intimacy, the lighting speaks to Bergman’s broader attentiveness to the dining experience — moving through a venue seat by seat, moment by moment.
“I always ask myself, what is the experience of walking through a venue? What am I seeing? What is it going to feel like? I don’t want any seat in the venue to be disappointing in any way. I want the mood to be just right.”
Custom details are another expression of Bergman’s holistic design philosophy. Parchment lights connected to the central bar are finished with dark chocolate edging, while downstairs, joinery sits before reflective high-gloss shelves. Commissioned pieces from long-time collaborator, Melbourne-based industrial design studio Please Please Please, add another layer of personality and idiosyncrasy.
The world-building continues downstairs in Studio Amaro’s basement cocktail bar. Moody and bunker-like, the space is layered with cork floors, plywood-lined walls, glazed tiling and retro-inspired fabrics. Here, the venue’s disco and funk influences come into focus, with music spun from a repurposed mid-century console. If the upper dining room is warm and inviting to all, downstairs is the exclusive after-party — still tailored, but looser at the edges.
“As designers, we are trying to tell stories, and people are being more adventurous in doing that. Creating our own backdrop along with music and branding. People have a hunger for new, to be stimulated, and that is definitely flowing through into hospitality and community spaces, pushing the boundaries more and more, which is exciting.”
For Bergman, food, music, light and design are all part of the same story. A restaurant is not only a place to eat, but a sensory experience that can lift us out of the mundane — suspending reality for a moment of affogato and fior di latte delight.
Like its namesake aperitif, Studio Amaro is an exercise in complexity: warm, tactile, seductive and, indeed, a world of its own.
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