The light
Beeswax candles on every table, wall lamps dimmed by hand, not a single spotlight above a plate. By midnight the hall is lit almost entirely by flame.
Home / The House
The house, room by room
Four years of restoration, Viennese craftsmen, and a deliberately small number of seats. This page is about the building, and about how an evening moves through it.
The house
I
The house
Brought back by hand, not by machine
The house was put up in 1891 and served a family of wine merchants for almost a century as both home and counting house. A printer moved in afterwards, and later a store room. When we found it, the original stucco still lay under seven coats of oil paint.
The restoration took four years. We worked with Viennese craftsmen who still run cornices in plaster and glaze windows with drawn glass. We added nothing the house did not already have — we took off what had been laid on later.
The mood of the evening
The light falls, the tempo changes
An evening here is set like a score: the light sinks half a tone every hour, service slows after the second course, and after ten the piano takes the place of the silence. Nobody will tell you when to get up.
The table
Hand-washed linen, white porcelain without decoration, mouth-blown glass. The table is laid in front of the guest, not hours beforehand.
The quiet
No background music before nine. The walls were treated acoustically so that your conversation cannot be followed from the next table.
The bar
Evenings with a theme
A different appointment every week
Some evenings are simply dinner. Others have a reason, and the reason is usually somebody who grew, pressed or wrote something worth an hour of the night.