Pierre Sang

Chef: Pierre Sang
Space: Le Loft
Country: Paris, France
Model: Mont Blanc

Food holds particular significance for renowned chef Pierre Sang. Born in South Korea, he was adopted by a Parisian family at seven years old. Cooking played a major role in his integration into French society.

With a 60-strong workforce with 10 different nationalities, social and gastronomic diversity is central to Sang’s approach, emphasising his worldly personality. This is underpinned with a deep-felt sense of community, shared by the teams across his five restaurants in Paris’s fashionable 11th arrondissement.

Building on the success of his celebrated flagship restaurant, Pierre Sang in Oberkampf, he recently launched Le Loft, an informal space dedicated to private dining and events. Specifically designed to evoke the feeling of home entertaining, the restaurateur wanted to create a soft and cosy, welcoming space overflowing with hospitality.

Sang wanted Le Loft’s décor to evoke the precision, refinement and variety of his cuisine. This applied to everything from walls, floors and ceilings to furniture, fixtures and fittings. Everything had to be of the highest quality, but equally subtle and without bombast.

As such, the surfaces were a particularly important consideration as they would dictate the overall diner experience of Le Loft, setting the tone throughout the rest of the space.

Having previously shied away from Carrara marble-style worktops, which he felt were aesthetically cold and unsuitable for the requirements of a professional kitchen, Sang had a change of heart when he was introduced to Neolith® and one of its latest patterns, Mont Blanc .

Specified for Le Loft’s central kitchen island, worktops and splashbacks, Mont Blanc is a homage to white quartzite. It possesses an enrapturing neutral palette, combining a creamy white background with gentle veining in deep black, oxide and ochre hues. Using a special technique, Neolith has created an inward relief exactly where the veins are, delivering an unusual texture which is pleasing to the touch.

From an aesthetic perspective, Rich wanted to find a balance between individualism and neutrality. The room needed to possess an original character but equally not look too busy in order to provide a suitable backdrop for filming.

The layout of the room also had to take Rich’s filming into account, so Hinged had to design the kitchen specifically to allow a whole camera crew the ability to film and enough space for the chef to work. As such, the team designed a kitchen island to architecturally anchor the room, providing a visual focal point but also a practical prop around which to record.

As important as the overall look, he also required heavy duty, hard wearing material to be used throughout the space, particularly the work surfaces which would be in constant use, day-in-day-out.