Awarded TAK Restaurant in Stockholm designed by Wingårdhs. A mix between Japanese and Nordic styles

Frida Ronge is among the artists who have succeeded in elevating Swedish raw materials to Japanese levels. Her workshop is the kitchen, her canvas the table set for a meal. With the restaurant Tak (Roof), she has been given an entirely new shop to work with, one established expressly for creating a perfect evening encounter between the Nordic and the Japanese. The new restaurant lies on Brunkebergs Square, in the middle of downtown Stockholm, in a rather inward-looking former 1970s office building. But the location on the two top floors endowed the space with opportunities to do much more. When it was decided to replace the surrounding walls with glass, the sense of confinement opened up like a breath of fresh air.

Today the magazine Wallpaper awarded Tak a share of first place in the Best New Restaurant category for its 2018 Design Awards.

“We have worked to fulfill Chef Ronge's gastronomic ambitions with our interior design. We have been inspired by Japanese methods of designing spaces, but have used a Nordic palette of materials” says Helena Toresson, senior lead architect at Wingårdhs.

The building's 1970s character also flavored the interior. The Structuralist fascination with systems and flexibility is not far removed, discernable in the tracks in the ceiling and the polished concrete floors. The play of the screens with open and closed, the rhythms of the ceilings.

“In the center of the restaurant we have the sofas competing with the tables with a view. The sofas frame the guests in their booths and give the room the graceful buoyance of a pond of floating lilies. A poetic element in the otherwise so rational expression,” says Gert Wingårdh, responsible architect.

Jasper Morrison, one of the six members of the jury, explains in an interview with Wallpaper, that Tak won his vote due to”the contrast of the rather delicate interior, playing off against the brutalist structures which contain it”.

“The Nordic furniture tradition provided a good foundation. We developed a series of new tables that were well suited to Jasper Morrison's Lightwood chair,” says David Regestam, project architect at Wingårdhs and the designer of the tables. “We designed screens, ceilings, pleated booth collars, banquettes and bars—and none of it would have been possible without what we learned both here at home and in Japan.”

One flight up from the subdued elegance of the restaurant, we are met by a more straightforward, plainspoken bar. Here the atmosphere is dominated by the buzz of people, the music, the tentative glances. The south-facing roof terrace is the focal point—a well-appointed home for the commanding view over Stockholm.

Visit the Tak Restaurant website
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