Rustic look for Jamie Oliver restaurant chain

Jamie Oliver is bringing his take on Italian food to the nation with the help of restaurant interiors by Martin Brudnizki Design Studio and Stiff & Trevillion Architects.

Six more Jamie’s Italian outlets are planned over the next year following the opening of the first one, designed by MBDS, in Oxford last spring. Stiff & Trevillion is designing the next one to open, for Bath, with five more by MBDS beginning with the Kingston branch in late November.

According to MBDS interior designer Tim Baldwin, the approach is rustic Italian without being too cheesy.

“We’re using rustic materials with a contemporary twist,” he says, adding that the restaurants will vary in response to their context — a more refectory style is planned in Cambridge, for example.

“Jamie and the directors [of Jamie’s Italian] didn’t want us to churn out a series of chain restaurants,” he says.

One common theme in the MBDS outlets is use of natural materials such as sawn timber, combined with a lot of black and steel in details such as coat hooks and light fittings. For the Oxford and Kingston branches, MBDS sourced reclaimed chapel chairs, while other branches feature pink Tolix metal chairs. Another feature is hanging displays of meats and vegetables to stress the quality of the ingredients.

MBDS has also just completed The Club, a private members’ club at The Ivy, and is designing a restaurant for chef Richard Corrigan next month.