Växthuset Restaurant

If you go down to the foot of the huge concrete bridge from Skanstull in Stockholm, manage to find your way behind sport halls and under motorways, in summer you will find Trädgården (”The Garden” in swedish). The club is its own world under the bridge, and offers all from relaxed daytime hangouts to all night dancing. On warm summer nights, there are more than a thousand visitors a day, and as the night go by, the queues grow longer.*
Since Trädgården moved in in 2009, the area has grown and developped, and in the summer of 2013, it was time to start a proper restaurant – Växthuset (”The Green House”)

The Green House
The restaurant is built on an existing terrace, with an old office building as a backdrop, next to some containers and around two giant concrete pillars – the piers for the motorway bridge.
Adding green elements was important to the restaurateurs, to emphasise that the kitchen is working with high quality produce, in close collaboration with local farmers.
We have added an inner layer – a wooden structure with walls of hanging plants and lights – to catch the evening sun, and to create a pleasant room where you
would like to sit down and have a nice dinner. (Or, maybe later at night, dance on the tables – if you´d feel like it…) The outer fences have been replaced by planter boxes with lush plants.
The room is shaped so that you can stow away some of the furniture, those towards the yard and the bar in front. Then, the terrace turns into a stage, and the crowd can fill the whole yard. This comes to use for Daytime Sessions, for instance – well attended sessions with star DJ´s, that start already early in the afternoons.
One of the containers has been opened up into a small bar, with a sunny area in front where you can have a drink while waiting for a table.

The furniture are mostly robust and fixed; plywood benches along the walls, floor mounted bar height tables. The furnishings also have a topography escalating from the yard, so that when seated in the restaurant, you have a good view of the people below, and in reverse you are also clearly visible.
Materials are mostly nature colored, warm and woody – fir, fir plywood, form plywood, to create warmth and a nice contrast to the concrete bridge.

During the course of the evening, the light changes gradually. Early on, the wall seats catch the evening sun, when dusk falls, bulbs gleam hanging among the wall plants or from the ceiling, and late at night Trädgården turns into an enchanting club land of coloured lights, music and people.

www.tradgarden.com

Photos by Mattias Sätterström, www.satterstrom.se