Aparna Ramani contacted us with a concept drawing of what she wanted to achieve when upgrading the interior of the Peech Hotel’s restaurant. The pieces required were a steel till point, a table base with built-in lamp posts, booth seating and finally steel see-through dividers suspended from the ceiling. All the items needed to be manufactured in the cleanest way possible to tie in with the rest of the hotel.
The standard pieces were easy to interpret from the concept drawings but the challenge was with the steel mesh dividers. The dividers needed to be thin, sleek and yet rigid enough to handle the hustle and bustle of a working restaurant. A hardy material for the centre panels of the screens would need to be sourced and a method of suspending from the ceiling would have to be designed.
To allow patrons to see into the restaurant and yet provide some privacy to diners we decided on using stainless steel mesh used for sifting sand for the internals of the panels. Attaching the mesh to the outer steel frame was easier said than done because we weren’t able to weld the mesh to the frame. Our solution was to use a multipurpose elastic adhesive to bond the mesh to the frame. To give the mesh rigidity we tensioned it using weights and clamps when glueing. The suspension and tensioning of the dividers was achieved by mounting the frames to the floor and then suspended using balustrade tensioning cable.
