Hospitality design is often discussed through the details you can point to: the curve of a bar, the material palette, the way lighting behaves after dark, how styling can frame a menu or sharpen the mood of a room. But for Adelaide-based architecture and interiors practice studio gram, founded by Graham Charbonneau and Dave Bickmore, the measure of a venue is less about how it looks in isolation, and more about what it gives back once people are inside it.
Two such venues – Leigh Street Wine Room and Fino Vino, both LEIF partner venues brought to life by studio gram – speak clearly to this sensibility. Here, we caught up with Charbonneau and Bickmore to talk more about craft, context, and designing places where guests can shake the dust.
Photography by Josie Withers
For Charbonneau, the path into architecture and interiors started early, with a childhood fascination for buildings and the way they were pieced together. Before studying architecture, he worked as a carpenter, an experience that gave him a grounded understanding of construction and craft.
“I was always interested in how things were put together, how they felt, and the impact they could have on people,” he says. “That experience still heavily informs the way we approach projects today.”
Bickmore’s route was similarly hands-on. Growing up in the Riverland, he was “always drawing, building, and pulling things apart,” drawn to materials and the process of making. Over time, that curiosity widened into an interest in how spaces shape the way people feel and connect.
“That idea of craft remains central to how I work,” he says. “I’m deeply interested in the tactile side of design and in collaborating with makers, artists, and fabricators to create spaces that feel unique and enduring.”
“We approach projects holistically, considering everything from the broader architecture through to the atmosphere and finer interior details.”
At studio gram, architecture and interiors are not treated as separate disciplines, but as connected parts of the same conversation. The practice moves between the large and the small: the structure of a building, the way a venue runs, the mood of a room, the texture of a surface beneath the hand.
This becomes especially clear in hospitality, where a space has to work very hard without looking like it is trying. A restaurant or wine bar is never just an interior – it’s a gathering place, a working environment, a stage, and sometimes, if the mood is right, a memory-making machine. It needs to be practical and durable, but also warm enough to make people order another glass and convince their tablemates it’s fine to linger a little longer.
“We’re generally less interested in trends and more interested in creating spaces that feel authentic to their context,” says Bickmore. “That might come from the surrounding streetscape, the history of a building, the personality of an operator, or even the pace and rhythm of how a venue functions throughout the day.”
That emphasis on authenticity runs through Leigh Street Wine Room, a wine bar and store in the heart of Adelaide. The venue pays homage to the classic wine bars of yesteryear: the kind of neighbourhood place that feels equally welcoming to the casual sipper and the serious wine drinker.
“At Leigh Street Wine Room, the fully arched ceiling is probably my favourite aspect of the project,” says Charbonneau. “It became the defining gesture of the space, something that gives the venue a sense of rhythm and intimacy while also creating a really memorable spatial identity.”
It’s the kind of detail that feels obvious only after it exists, as though the space had been waiting for it all along. A simple curve becomes the atmosphere: “It draws you through the venue and creates a kind of element that feels very simple in hindsight, but it completely shaped the atmosphere of the space,” Charbonneau says.
Fino Vino, meanwhile, makes the idea of play more explicit. A celebration of country and city, the Adelaide restaurant marks a coming-of-age for a venue that began life in a small town, moved to a winery, and eventually settled in the city. In studio gram’s hands, that story becomes a game of contrasts: simplicity mixed with antiquity, custom detailing set against the reclaimed, the curated rubbing up against the haphazard.
The building’s layers were peeled back to expose a warm masonry interior, with a material palette that feels earthy and direct. Stone sourced from near the Flinders Ranges connects the fit-out to South Australian terroir, while the project also champions emerging and established local makers and creatives.
Fino Vino finds its pleasure in contrast. Nothing feels too matched or overly resolved. Instead, the room carries the feeling of something gathered over time, where looseness is part of the design.
“The strongest venues are cohesive because the offering, service model and spatial experience are all working toward the same narrative.”
For studio gram, the relationship between a venue’s design and its food and beverage offering is inseparable. A daytime café, an intimate wine bar and a late-night restaurant all require different cues, not only in how they look, but in how they ask people to behave.
“The design needs to support the type of experience the operator is trying to create,” says the studio. “We often talk about designing for behaviour – how long people stay, how they interact, whether the experience is energetic, slow, communal or intimate.
This is where the complexity of hospitality design reveals itself. Behind the apparent ease of a beloved venue is a long list of competing demands: budget, compliance, service flow, brand identity, lighting, acoustics, durability and time. The task, says studio gram, is making all of this disappear into something that still feels human.
“One of the biggest challenges is creating spaces that still feel human and emotionally engaging despite all of those constraints,” they say. “Hospitality venues also experience wear differently to most spaces. They need to age well and carry character over time.”
In studio gram’s work, warmth is never accidental, and play is never just decoration. Their venues feel alive because they leave room for people and conversation and appetite and looseness and mood. Hallmarks of the best hospitality spaces, which aren’t designed to be simply looked at. They’re designed to be lived in and loved, over and over again.
