Geometry as hospitality: Gatserelia Design at Aï, and a Beirut studio’s first European room

Restaurant interiors

Reading time: 9 min

Aï opened in Vienna in the autumn of 2017 as the first European room by Gatserelia Design of Beirut. Six hundred square metres, two floors, a robata grill, a sushi bar, a cocktail bar and a lounge, all held together by geometry rather than by decoration. The design record deserves setting straight, starting with the marble, which nobody has ever named correctly.

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Aï opened at Seitzergasse 6 in Vienna’s first district at the very end of September 2017, inside the Goldenes Quartier. It ran to roughly 600 square metres over two floors and seated around 130, across a robata charcoal grill, a sushi bar, a cocktail bar and a lounge. The interiors were by Gatserelia Design of Beirut, the studio of Gregory Gatserelia.

The name is worth getting right before anything else. It is Aï, usually written with the diaeresis in Austrian press, and the operator explained it as the Japanese and Chinese word for love. It has nothing whatever to do with artificial intelligence, a coincidence that has grown considerably more inconvenient since 2017.

What makes the project worth returning to is not that it was a luxurious room, though it was. It is that it was a Beirut practice’s first commission in Europe, delivered into one of the most closely watched retail addresses on the continent, and that the design decisions in it were sharper than the published record suggests.

A Beirut studio’s first European room

Gatserelia Design was founded in 1987 in Toronto by Gregory Gatserelia with his brother Alexander, and moved to Beirut in 1996. Gatserelia is of Georgian origin, spent his childhood in Syria, was educated in France, and enrolled at the Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts in Lebanon in 1967 after his family moved there. The studio is based in Karantina, in the port district of Beirut, and runs to somewhere between eleven and fifty people. He has around a hundred Beirut projects behind him.

His stated method is worth having in mind when reading the Vienna room. “I start a story more or less when I feel like there is an ambience that has to exist but doesn’t exist yet,” he has said. And elsewhere, more flatly: “I am not bound by any special style. I start each project with a blank page.”

Vienna was the outward step. Aï was shortlisted in the Europe Restaurant category at the Restaurant & Bar Design Awards 2018, and what followed matters to how the project should be read: SPINE in Beirut took both the Middle East and Africa Bar category and Best Overall Bar in 2019; Le Sushi Bar in Beirut won its category in 2020; and L’Atelier de Joël Robuchon in Dubai followed in 2021, having already taken a darc award in 2020 for lighting, delivered with Hilights of Lebanon. Vienna sits at the front of that run.

The marble nobody has named correctly

Every English-language account of this project describes the stone as “Badoglio imperial marble”. No such stone exists in any quarry catalogue or supplier index.

The material is Bardiglio Imperiale. It comes from a single quarry in the province of Massa-Carrara in Tuscany. It is a dark grey to ashy-blue marble with a fine, even grain, darker streaks and thin light-grey veining, and an unusually hard, almost glassy structure that takes a high polish. It is used for flooring, stair and bathroom cladding and worktops, is often set against white Carrara in chequerboard floors, and is supplied polished, honed, hammered, flamed or chiselled.

The error appears to originate in the studio’s own English press material and has been copied outward ever since, quite possibly through a slip toward Pietro Badoglio, the Italian marshal. It is worth correcting, because the actual stone tells you more about the room than the invented one. A single-quarry marble with a hard, glassy body and almost no drama in its veining is a specifier’s choice, not a showman’s. It gives you a deep, even, cool grey ground that will not fight anything placed on it, which is exactly what a room full of polished copper needs underneath.

Geometry as a way of making a big room small

The site was irregular, as sites inside historic Viennese blocks tend to be, and the studio’s response was to treat that as the brief rather than the obstacle. Their stated aim was to use “geometrical and sculptured elements that direct the eye to smaller social settings.”

That is the whole spatial argument, and it is a good one. Six hundred square metres holding four different modes of eating and drinking is a scale at which a room can easily become a hall. Rather than dividing it with partitions, Gatserelia used angle, facet and sculptural form to break sightlines, so that a guest at the sushi counter is in a different room from a guest in the lounge without a wall between them.

Two moves soften and modulate that. On the ground floor, round suspension lighting was used deliberately against the sharp architectural edges, a circle introduced precisely where the geometry is hardest. On the upper level, a copper grid does the opposite job, adding structure and shadow, and the studio noted that it changes the character of the room as the evening comes in. A grid over a light source is an old device and a reliable one: it turns a single wash into hundreds of small events on the ceiling, and it goes on working long after the daylight has gone.

Copper, leather, walnut

The palette is short and it is applied with discipline.

Polished copper panels on walls and ceilings do the reflective work, picking up movement and light across the room. Hand-stitched leather appears on the bar and on wall surfaces, which is the one properly tactile material in the scheme and is placed exactly where hands go. Table tops are American walnut. Upholstery runs to soft, warm neutrals used to distinguish one zone from another, with soft blue bar stools at the counter as the single note of colour. Bespoke Japanese porcelain was commissioned for the restaurant.

One point of specification is unresolved and worth flagging rather than smoothing over. The studio’s English material describes copper walls and ceilings; contemporary German-language coverage describes the palette as dark marble, leather and brass. Both metals are certainly present, since the staircase is credited as glass and brass, but which one dominates the ceiling planes is not settled by the published record.

The stair and the glass sculpture

The vertical connection is where the project is most itself.

The staircase wraps around the lift core and is clad in geometric glass and brass, so the circulation is not a corridor between two restaurants but a faceted object in the middle of the plan. Wrapping a stair around a lift is a straightforwardly efficient move, since it puts all the vertical servicing into one core, but cladding that core in faceted glass turns a necessity into the room’s centrepiece.

Alongside it runs a glass sculpture linking the two levels, which the studio described as symbolising a fusion of local and Lebanese cultural influences. That is the most interesting claim anyone made about this project, and also the least explained. What a Beirut studio meant by fusing Lebanese and Viennese references in a glass object, in a Japanese restaurant, in an Austrian luxury quarter, is a question nobody appears to have asked at the time. It deserves an answer.

The bridge over the Tuchlaubenhof

The site has a good deal more history than the 2017 fit-out implies.

The Tuchlaubenhof began as Vienna’s first bazaar, built between 1838 and 1840 by Friedrich Stache with a glazed passage through it, and was rebuilt in reinforced concrete from 1909 by Alfred Teller and Emmerich Spielmann. The Goldenes Quartier as it exists today was assembled by Signa Gruppe, which acquired the Tuchlaubenhof in 2007 and the neighbouring Am Hof 2 in 2008, and carried out a comprehensive refurbishment between 2010 and 2015, with the 2013 repositioning credited to HNP architects. The quarter now runs to around 11,500 square metres of retail, some 9,500 square metres of offices and luxury apartments above, with the Park Hyatt Vienna in the Am Hof building.

Aï’s best inherited asset was a glazed bridge across the Tuchlaubenhof gallery, which the restaurant used as a floating dining room for private events. A room suspended over a nineteenth-century shopping passage is not something a designer can invent, and using it as the private room rather than as circulation was the right call.

What happened next

Aï traded for around eight months. The operating company, AT Kamp Catering GmbH, entered insolvency proceedings in Vienna in May 2018 and the restaurant closed. It had been conceived as the pilot for an international group, and the concept did continue: an Aï opened in Beirut in November 2021, on Ahmad Chawki Street, at a similar 600 square metres, again built around robata, sushi and a lounge, and it is still trading.

The Vienna unit reopened in October 2019 as Bar Campari, a complete new interior by Matteo Thun & Partners for Campari with Peter Friese of Zum Schwarzen Kameel operating, with furniture by Cassina, lighting structures by Panzeri and mosaic by Bisazza. It still trades, and it still uses the bridge over the Tuchlaubenhof, which is a quiet compliment to the qualities of the space Gatserelia was given.

Gatserelia now

The studio is busy and its centre of gravity has moved outward.

Gatserelia founded SMO Gallery in Beirut in 2011 to promote Lebanese designers including Najla El Zein, Karim Chaya and Georges Mohasseb. It closed in 2016 and was revived in 2025 at Villa Audi. In 2019 he co-founded The Great Design Disaster with Joy Herro, a platform that puts collectors directly in touch with artisans on commissioned pieces, and which took a permanent Milan address on Via della Moscova in 2025.

Rizzoli published a monograph, Gregory Gatserelia: The Art of Interiors, edited by Federica Sala, in April 2024. At We Design Beirut in October 2025 he curated Totems of the Present and the Absent at Villa Audi, partly as a tribute to SMO. The studio’s most recent restaurant work on the awards record is Mr. Panther in Lagos, shortlisted in 2025, with current projects reported across Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, the UK, France and Morocco.

For a practice whose first European room was a Vienna two-floor puzzle in 2017, that is a considerable spread.

Frequently asked questions

Final thoughts

The lasting value of this project is in the plan rather than the palette. Gatserelia was handed six hundred irregular square metres in a historic Viennese block and asked to fit four different kinds of hospitality into it, and the answer was to break the space with geometry instead of walls, then wrap the vertical core in faceted glass so that the busiest part of the plan became the thing you look at. That approach travels. The copper and the leather are of their moment. The idea that a large room can be made intimate by faceting rather than partitioning is not.

The unanswered question is the glass sculpture. A Beirut studio said it made an object that fused Lebanese and local influences, in a Japanese restaurant, in Vienna, and then nobody followed up. Gatserelia is still working and still talking. Somebody should ask him what it meant.