Company of Cooks: RHS Wisley Glasshouse Kitchen
The Setting
Wisley is the flagship garden of the Royal Horticultural Society (RHS) and one of the UK’s most visited and best-loved gardens. The 240-acre site attracts around one million visitors each year. Some 75 garden staff, 25 students, four apprentices and 100 volunteers tend to the plant collections.
Its history can be traced back to 1878 when George Fergusson Wilson, a keen grower of fruit and orchids, bought the site and established his 'Oakwood experimental garden'. After Wilson's death in 1902, Sir Thomas Hanbury, founder of La Mortola Garden in Italy, purchased Oakwood and adjoining Glebe Farm and donated it to the Royal Horticultural Society for its perpetual use.
The Context
There are six food and beverage offerings at Wisley: Terrace Restaurant, Wisley Café, Food Hall, World Food Café, Stone Pine Café and Glasshouse Kitchen. Our remit was the latter, which is named after the huge cathedral-like Glasshouse, which sits adjacent to the Glasshouse Kitchen. Covering an area the size of 10 tennis courts and rising to 12 metres in height, the Glasshouse is home to the RHS’s world-class tender plant collection.
Change to Proposition
Working with Company of Cooks, the specialist food & beverage (F&B) providers, our brief was to refresh the interior design of the Glasshouse Kitchen to reflect a new Italian F&B offering. Previously the Glasshouse Kitchen had been called the Glasshouse Café and it provided a self-service, ‘grab and go’ choice to visitors. Renamed the Glasshouse Kitchen, to distinguish it from the two other cafés at Wisley, the venue now provides a table service aimed at families, such as the ones visiting the soft-play area adjacent to the restaurant. The menu has also changed from typical take-out fare such as sandwiches and salads and hot and cold drinks to an Italian sit-down, table-service menu offering pizzas, pasta and salads.
Scope of Work
Our scope of work encompassed the redesign of the restaurant’s interiors and layout (to increase the number of covers from 72 to 90), the refurbishment of the kitchens to include two new conveyor-style pizza oven (capable of baking 100 pizzas an hour), a new self-service servery hatch providing F&B to people sitting on the terrace, the toilets, and the refurbishment of existing outdoor seating and tables.
Modern Italian
The new restaurant features a light, fresh colour-scheme, which will be enhanced in the Summer months by natural lighting flooding through the south-facing windows. Terracotta banquette seating provides a pop of contrasting colour to the light cream tables and seating. Terrazzo tiles, common in Italy, are used for flooring in the restaurant. These are paired with Amtico Granary Oak and Natural Limed Wood flooring; the Limed Wood also being used for the servery cladding. The servery, serving hot and cold drinks including alcohol, has a counter dressed in appropriately named Gelato gloss ceramic tiles.
The lighting is a combination of 400mm bamboo globe lights and rose-coloured pendant lighting. These are complemented by suspended deep-recessed lighting bars. The walls are decorated with framed botanical RHS prints and the floor dotted with planters of different shapes.
Inside and Out
The Glasshouse Kitchen has a large outdoor terrace with seating for 100. A new servery hatch was introduced to enable those who prefer to stay outside to order food and hot and cold drinks. To complement the refreshed interiors, we had the terrace’s existing teak tables and chairs sanded and oiled to bring out the wood’s natural colouring.
In Time for Glow
The Glasshouse Kitchen was re-opened in time for the Wisley’s annual Glow Festival (24th November to 2nd January), where visitors can enjoy the gardens, buildings, walkways and glasshouses lit up and suffused in lights of many colours.
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