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EMMA MAXWELL UNVEILS A SPECTACULAR NEW SPACE FOR
BURNT ENDS RESTAURANT IN DEMPSEY, SINGAPORE
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Singapore: When Dave Pynt decided to move his laureled modern barbecue restaurant, Burnt Ends from its Chinatown perch to Dempsey, there was really no question who the Australian chef would tap for the interiors. “Emma’s one-liner design pitch to me was ‘Fire, skulls and AC/DC’, and that pretty much sold me!” says the heavy-metal-loving, tattooed, iconoclastic chef of his fellow Antipodean, the Singapore-based interior designer, Emma Maxwell.

True to her pitch, Maxwell has turned a mid-century colonial military barracks at 7 Dempsey Road into a mesmerising visual fest that blends Pynt’s culinary ethos and his ambitions for the restaurant - already crowned with a Michelin-star and ranked among the World’s 50 Best Restaurants - with a dash of his outsized personality.

“I loved the original space at Teck Lim Road which Dave opened in 2013 and where we first met and became friends,” Maxwell says. “I was a regular at the restaurant and over the years, I came to intimately understand the food and Dave’s ethos. My challenge with Dempsey was to keep all the features that made the Chinatown restaurant so memorable in its intimacy, whilst evolving them in the context of an enormous new 16,000 sqft space.”

Maxwell solved the challenge with a design that dramatically references the foundational components and ingredients of a barbecue - flames, wood and metal - whilst anchoring the whole with generous lashings of imagination and brio.

In particular, fire and heat are the touchstones of the design. Primal and elemental in their nature, and prized for their transformative, shape-shifting qualities, these touchstones are the bedrock of Pynt’s robustly muscular cooking, their presence infused in each of Burnt Ends’ three rooms - the dining room, the private dining room, and the bar.

In the dining room, a long slab of Indonesian suar becomes the counter table framing the open kitchen, the latter anchored by three tonnes worth of ovens whose sheer physical presence extends into the private dining room. “The ovens are the heart of the entire restaurant, a constant primordial burning fire of 1000 degrees,” says Maxwell. “Everything, from the food to the interior design, comes from them.”

The floors are lined with teak planks rescued from an old bridge in Surabaya, their grainy patina already turning a darker hue with wear and age. The extant square pillars of the old barracks are sheathed in beaten copper panels, their surfaces mottled with random grid-like patterns imprinted from the palettes in which they were stored and transported.

A forest of studio lamps hangs from the double-height ceiling - the volume deliberately broken by the insertion of a faux wooden balcony - whilst the extra-wide teak-framed dining chairs, so comfortable because they were designed to be sat in for hours, are clad in vegetable-dyed leather and embellished on the back with tiny panels of customised buttons of skull, a detail that references Burnt Ends’ logo.

Meanwhile, the massive private dining room, accessed through a heavy teak door whose handle is a polished metal skull, is a bona fide showstopper. “We wanted this space to be exclusive and a little mysterious, so that diners in the main dining room might catch a glimpse of the interiors when the door is ajar and be intrigued by the people going in and then they don’t come out again,” Maxwell says.

Dark and mood-lit like the lair of a carnivorous beast - Pynt’s avatar, perhaps - the walls are lined with naturally contrasting panels of petrified wood and timber charred in the tradition of Japanese shou sugi ban; a 14-seater, six-metre-long dining table of petrified black wood; and soaring high above, an incredible tubular light installation made of 5,000 black lava stones which took six months to make and one-and-a-half weeks to install. Maxwell loves the idea of the lava stones coming into existence when they were shot out of a volcano. “But more than that, this room, to me, shows how the fire, wood and metallic elements of the restaurant all come together in one space.”

In particular, the designer wanted the private dining room to feel like a precious jewel box. “Precious in the sense of its high-value components, and the unexpected surprises the diner uncovers. Like a naturally occurring pattern on the chef’s counter that looks just like the panels on a dress in a Klimt painting. And since we finished this space, the colours have all changed and darkened. That’s the transformative, shape-shifting quality I was after.”