A horseshoe-shaped wooden counter topped with deep red marble anchors WINONA, the cocktail bar and restaurant Romain Basile Petrot has built in Paris for the teams behind Fugazi and Classique.
WINONA sits on rue des Trois Bornes, in the 11th, and the brief behind it was blunt: a sexy, glamorous room for drinks by Yves Karlier and small plates by Cecilia Munguira, the kitchen looking to Spain and Portugal. Adrien Vernet of Fugazi and Benjamin Le Seigneur of Classique brought in Romain Basile Petrot to turn that idea into a cocktail bar and restaurant with a body of its own.
The room unfolds lengthwise around the horseshoe-shaped counter, a wooden form topped with deep red marble and placed at the heart of the space. A glossy black floor and a lacquered ceiling give the interior a warm, almost nocturnal mood, carrying what Petrot calls a rock edge along with depth and intensity.
At the back, a large banquette and mirrored walls reinterpret the familiar codes of the Parisian bistro, so the space feels more enveloping. The mood there turns softer and more boudoir-like, built for lingering at the table and letting conversations stretch into the night.
Although WINONA was entirely rebuilt, the intention was to make it feel like a place that had somehow always been there. Rather than deliver an over-polished new interior, Petrot went after an immediate sense of character and familiarity, a room equally suited to long evenings with friends, to dates, and to being seen during Fashion Week.
The lighting does much of that work. Custom sconces and a ceiling light, both designed by Petrot, were conceived as part of the build, and they hold the room in a low, close glow. An aluminium bas-relief fresco by Valentine Nitram brings another material into play, evoking the spirit of the place as a banquet that slowly unfolds and unravels as the night goes on.
Petrot works between spatial and object design from Paris, treating furniture as something structural, pieces in which physical forces are made visible through form. Composition, clarity and raw material carry the practice, which tries to balance rigor with sensuality and to read the history of a space and the people who use it. The work has lately surfaced in a solo show at Ninetto Gallery in Athens, at Collectible in New York and Brussels, and at design weeks in Milan, Paris and Copenhagen. Alongside WINONA he recently finished a residential interior for an art collector, each project approached as a singular story to be written.
