Xing Hua Lou

A restaurant fit-out at Causeway Point. The shopfront carries an illuminated timber-slat feature and signage, with stone table tops, banquette seating and an ink-wash feature wall through the dining area.

A restaurant fit-out at Causeway Point, completed December 2019. A mall tenancy, which changes
the job before a single panel is cut: fixed handover dates, night works, goods-lift dimensions that
decide the maximum panel size, and a landlord who signs off the shopfront.

The shopfront does the work

In a mall, the frontage is the whole marketing budget. Here it carries illuminated signage over a
slatted timber field, with backlit menu panels and a decorative fretwork screen set into the
opening.

Illuminated lettering on a slatted background is harder than it looks: the slats sit proud, so
the light has to be set deep enough that the characters read evenly rather than hot at the centre
and dim at the ends. The fretwork screens are CNC-cut so the pattern repeats exactly across panels
of different widths.

Stone tops at volume

The dining area runs round tables on pedestal bases and a long banquette line with rectangular
tops on steel frames. In a house a stone top is a one-off; in a restaurant there are dozens, and
every one has to carry the same thickness, the same edge profile and the same polish.

They also have to survive service. A domestic counter gets wiped; a restaurant top gets cleared,
knocked and wiped forty times a day, which is a different specification for the same material.

Banquette seating has to follow the wall

A continuous banquette is joinery and upholstery working to one line. The base is built to the
wall as found — not as drawn — so the seat front stays parallel along the run even where
the wall does not. The ink-wash feature wall and the backlit stone-pattern panel behind the seating
then have to land on that same line.

Also see: EGA Juice Clinic, a juice bar
fit-out at Raffles Hospital, and our landed
home carpentry work.