Colicci runs cafés in some of London's parks and gardens, the places people go for a swim, a walk, or an afternoon at a museum. We've made tables and counters in our timber terrazzo for two of them: the Serpentine Lido café in Hyde Park, and the café at the Horniman Museum and Gardens in Forest Hill.
For many visitors the café is where the day slows down, so the room they sit in is part of the visit. Both of these cafés lean on timber to set that tone: wood floors, panelling, bentwood chairs, and wooden light fittings.
The Lido tables started with a beech tree felled beside the lido. We took the offcuts, cut them into chips, and cast them in a white binder as a one-off batch of wood terrazzo. Beech isn't in any of our standard colourways, so the material was made for this café alone.
It became the round table tops, set among cane bentwood chairs and a pale wood floor. People stopping in after a swim or a walk around the Serpentine are eating off wood that grew beside the lido.
Colicci has since come back to us for rectangular tops for the same café, this time in Ivory Cedar & Walnut.
At the Horniman, the café is a tall glazed hall with timber shingles on the gable wall and slatted timber panelling below. Our wood terrazzo forms a long L-shaped bar counter running along the glazing, with a rounded end, an upstand against the panelling, and the plywood edge left on show. Visitors sit at it on cork stools, looking out towards the gardens.
Ivory Cedar & Walnut mixes cedar and walnut wood chips in a cream binder, so the counter carries the same warm wood tones as the timber around it, on the surface people actually touch.
