A place in the heart of the Trastevere

The lively Trastevere district, the thirteenth Roman quarter, is located on the west bank of the Tiber, a tight web of cobbled roads running between medieval houses. The quarter has a large number of boutiques and shops of every kind, as well as cafés and family-run restaurants. In the oldest section of the quarter, the close weave of roads is punctuated by numerous small squares, of which the most evocative are Piazza Sant’Egidio, Piazza della Scala and Piazza Santa Maria in Trastevere. The latter takes its name from the area’s most important church, the Basilica of Santa Maria in Trastevere, founded in the Third Century and completely rebuilt in the Tenth Century, with its splendid wooden ceiling painted by Domenichino, the luminous cupola of the apse with its mosaic decoration and the cosmatesco marble floor with its geometrical patterns. This enchanting area of the Eternal City was the inspiration for Roman architects Andrea Desideri and Silvia Guzzini (Studio B15A) for the design of the new Bir&Fud pub restaurant, inaugurated in April 2014. As the name itself, taken from the gigantic B15A iceberg which formed in the Antarctic Ross Sea, indicates, the philosophy followed by the studio in its design is based on the observation of the landscape, its forms and variety, and on the search for a balance between the new, the natural environment, and existing structures. The design language of the Bir&Fud is profoundly inspired by the urban aspect of the Trastevere district: the narrow lanes of the quarter, opening into small, delightful squares, translate into the narrow, deep area of the pub, converging in the wide, luminous arena of the restaurant area. The colours of the furnishings and floors marry the gilded nuances of the mosaics and decoration of the nearby Basilica di Santa Maria in Trastevere with the warm, dark amber colour of handmade beer, characterising a setting in which colours, shapes and materials, abstracted from their conventional context, tell the story of an environment and a beverage which are among the oldest and widely known in the world. The pub gallery is dominated by a 12 m bar with heavy polished chestnut trunks, into which is set a counter in lava stone, to promote conversation between the client and barman. The walls are hung with decorations in the form of cereal grains, the basis of beer making, and shaped with slats recovered from antique oak barrels. The repetition of these modules along the profile of the vault gives a dynamism to the space as it approaches the central line of the bar itself, thus making it the centrepiece of the whole design. The floor features the hexagonal structure of the building’s original flooring, reinterpreted in decisive black and lead colours, combined with the warm amber colours of leather and beer. A strong sense of plasticity and softness is given by the very characteristic ceramics of the Ines series, chosen from the Tipico collection of Verso25, which restore the image of a colourful carpet as a homage to this suggestive corner of Rome, while highlighting the dynamism and depth of its spaces. The hexagonal motif of the floor continues to the centre of the restaurant area, where it gives way to flooring in the same hand-flamed chestnut wood used for the tables and for part of the walls.