Blue by Alain Ducasse

Blue by Alain Ducasse bring the art and elegance of French dining to ICONSIAM, Bangkok’s retail and leisure destination overlooking the Chao Phraya River. Developer Siam Piwat invited Ducasse to create a restaurant for this flagship development that would be quintessentially French, transporting guests to a world apart from the bustling Thai capital. Patrick Jouin and Sanjit Manku of Jouin Manku were entrusted with realising this vision through the restaurant’s interior spaces. 

At the outset of the project, Jouin and Manku began to explore the notion of ‘French’ in the global imagination that would capture its unique essence, quite removed from hackneyed clichés. They refined this to four core traits with which they could play: the bosquets or secluded gardens of the Château de Versailles, the rich and vibrant colour of royal blue, fashion and the art of pleated textiles, and the sparkle and lustre of the chandelier. As they began to consider the situation of the restaurant, occupying a glass-fronted pavilion overlooking the riverside, they also started to consider how they could bring guests on a journey, from the moment of entering the restaurant to encountering the magnificent expanse of the floor-to-ceiling views across Bangkok.

Beginning this journey, guests are drawn from the polished stone and glass surfaces of the luxury shopping mall into the welcoming enclosure of a wood-panelled lobby that gives just a hint of what lies beyond. They then move onwards into the lounge, an intimate space, utterly secluded from the world that they have left behind.
Here they are surrounded by wood and light, evoking the bosquet, a space of pleasure and privacy carved from nature. A screen of suspended lamps in walnut and brass encircles the space with a gentle vertical rhythm, suggesting an enchanted forest alive with the play of fireflies. A bronze mesh light feature that leads from the ceiling of the lobby through to the lounge casts dappled light as if falling through a canopy of trees.