Located in the Mexican city of Morelia, Daniela Bucio Sistos has transformed three buildings dating back to the middle of the last century into the new Santomate Restaurant. After a previous remodeling in the 90s, this latest intervention spatially and visually connects the three separate properties to create a cozy dining atmosphere, all the while highlighting Mexican craft and labor.
Almost monochromatic spaces are created inside and outside to avoid the variety of materials and textures that would distract the user and that would also distance the patio and vegetation from being the main protagonists. The range of colors is inspired by the shades of the region’s glazed pottery, green, blue and yellow.
Santomate seeks to be an experience which the user will experience and discover little by little as he travels around the place. When you enter Santomate through the narrow door on Patzimba Street, the dark green foyer is a small nod to what awaits you inside. In the bar, a curved green handcrafted tile bar accompanied by a copper countertop is the first visual touch, the warm lighting of the space accentuates the existing wooden beams.
From the bar you can already see the large central patio which is bathed in green to blend in with the foliage of the large tree that stands in the centre, this space being a large terrace/dining room.
Santomate, will also welcome its guests in blue rooms, the main one of them has a large fireplace that covers an entire wall in wood and the opposite wall is dressed with more than fifty pineapples of glazed pottery, handicrafts from San Jose de Gracia, Michoacan.
The bathrooms were designed with the same detail and attention, they make a transition from green to yellow, being these previously very narrow and monotonous spaces, it breaks with the latter by raising two walls of yellow tile in the center of each bathroom to achieve this transition and dressing. The yellow seeks to give luminosity and dynamism in conjunction with the copper basins made in Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán.
