The team and their guests celebrate small pleasures and great moments together, in dual settings that combine to form a whole where everything engenders repose and delight. To the left, the bar with its enlivening orange-accented hues and its cascades of metallic beads, greets us like old acquaintances. There, friends share secrets as they enjoy their cocktails amidst gentle laughter. To the right, the restaurant entices guests with stunning vistas over the river as they sit down to a setting of glass and anthracite, or near the soaring windows. The enveloping comfort, the seductive ambiance, the intriguing elegance - all blend subtly, revealing to the keen observer a simplicity fashioned from ingenious and original details.

The interior design of DNA restaurant is by Bruno Braën.



November 2008
Grand prize, Restaurant Category

For more details
http://www.creativitemontreal.com/


ENAMOURED WITH PROVOCATION AND ILLUSION
From INTÉRIEURS Magazine May-June 2008
By Alain Rochereau

A rebel with the spirit of an iconoclast, yet a very good listener in life, Bruno Braën is on of those designers who designs space instinctively. To him, interiors must be alive and, to do so, he endows them with provocative and jubilatory objects.

"What I do is not perfect". he says modestly. Braën, the autodidact therefore never attempts to impose a formal style. "Some people are restricted to a limited number of ideas. Myself, I get bored with uniformity". Which is what drives him to leave a few "accidents" behind in the spaces he designs, like the irregular sewing work on the tufting of the black seats in DNA restaurant.
In not imposing a style, Bruno B raën is also very sensitive to space, as much in volumetric terms as that of emotional potential. DNA was too vast, with too hight ceilings. "One felt lost in all that space", the designer recalls. It needed to be fragmented, but the magnificent view on the port and Habitat 67 had to be preserved. His sensitivity to space gave birth to a simple but bright idea: to set up elevated glass cubes, to bring the space to a human scale and to playfully allude to the buildings thought-out by Moshe Safdie.