Typhoon Wood and Oyster Shells
von Redaktion
Typhoon Wood and Oyster Shells
How Roganic Hong Kong Redefined Restaurant Sustainability: This years Restaurant & Bar Design Awards 2025 Reveal a Split in How the Industry Defines Luxury.
von Redaktion
In the international hospitality industry, two opposing design philosophies are competing for dominance. Some designers are betting on scale, dramatic lighting, and architectural excess. Others are stripping back to essentials—letting materials, provenance, and craft do the talking.
The Restaurant & Bar Design Awards 2025 showcase both approaches. Suparnin in Guangzhou—designed by Republic Metropolis Architecture—won Best Overall Restaurant with a monumental, sculptural space that deploys high-performance materials like carbon fiber and fiberglass-reinforced gypsum. Meanwhile, Roganic Hong Kong took the Sustainability category with an entirely different strategy: building luxury from the city's discarded infrastructure.
What emerges is a fractured definition of luxury: visual impact versus cultural depth.
A Different Kind of Winner
Among the shortlisted projects this year, one stood out for what it didn't do. Roganic in Hong Kong, designed by local firm Atelier E with HK Timberbank, won the Sustainability category without the usual visual markers of eco-design. No living walls. No recycled-content certificates displayed prominently. No sustainability manifesto printed on the menu.
The restaurant sources its timber from Hong Kong's discarded infrastructure—trees toppled by typhoons, wood from demolished buildings. In collaboration with HKTimberbank, Atelier E turned what would have been landfill into the restaurant's entrance panels, tables, and a sculptural center tree. The bar counter? Ground oyster shells mixed with recycled stone. The flooring? Broken marble tiles, deliberately shattered and reassembled. Even the chairs were salvaged from Roganic's previous location, reupholstered with reclaimed fabric.
The result doesn't read as eco-conscious design. It reads as design, full stop. There's no sustainability signage, no explanatory plaques. The materials speak for themselves.
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Since reopening in February 2025 at Lee Garden One, the restaurant has occupied 400 square meters designed entirely around waste diversion. Local artist Eunis Cheung treated the bar counter like a canvas, mixing discarded stone and oyster shells into the finish. The entrance panels, tables, and a sculptural tree in the center of the dining room all came from the same source: HKTimberbank's inventory of salvaged local wood.
Why This Matters for Luxury Design
Here's the thing: Roganic's aesthetic doesn't look like traditional "quiet luxury." Reclaimed timber shows its age. Reconstructed marble bears witness to its previous life. The oyster shell bar has texture, character, imperfection.
In luxury hospitality, these are typically design flaws to be hidden. Atelier E made them the point. The space is calm, grounded, precise—but not in the polished, anonymous way that has come to define high-end minimalism. It's an alternative luxury syntax: one that privileges origin over finish, honesty over perfection.
The numbers back up the approach. Roganic holds both a Michelin Star and Hong Kong's first Michelin Green Star. It previously won 100 Top Tables' inaugural Sustainability Hero award. Chef Simon Rogan's broader restaurant group—spanning England, Malta, Thailand and Hong Kong—now holds 10 Michelin stars and two Green stars collectively.
The Competition: Luxury as Performance
The same awards ceremony that recognized Roganic's material honesty crowned an entirely different vision as Best Overall Restaurant. Suparnin in Guangzhou, designed by Republic Metropolis Architecture, represents luxury as architectural sculpture. The space deploys high-performance materials—carbon fiber, fiberglass-reinforced gypsum—to create a monumental yet fluid environment. It's luxury as technological prowess: controlled, perfected, almost futuristic. Where Roganic shows its materials' origins, Suparnin celebrates their technical possibilities.
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The jury's decision to award both projects—one the overall title, the other sustainability recognition—reveals the industry's current schism. Both approaches command respect. Both attract premium clientele. But they speak fundamentally different languages about what luxury means in 2025.
In Dubai, LITT Bar at Jumeirah Marsa Al Arab (winner in the Bar category) takes yet another route. Designed by Verhaal Studios, the space operates as pure theater—light installations, reflective surfaces, calculated shadow play. Open Wednesday through Sunday from 9pm to 3am, it's luxury as experiential spectacle. The bar doesn't hide its intentions: it's architecture in service of atmosphere, design as stagecraft.
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What the Split Reveals
The 2025 Restaurant & Bar Design Awards don't just show a luxury debate—they legitimize both sides. Suparnin wins Best Overall Restaurant with technological prowess and architectural sculpture. Roganic wins Sustainability with material honesty and local sourcing. LITT wins Best Bar with theatrical spectacle. Three winners, three philosophies, all equally valid in the eyes of the industry's most influential jury.
This isn't a competition between approaches. It's a declaration that luxury hospitality now operates on multiple registers simultaneously. Suparnin's carbon fiber and Roganic's typhoon wood can coexist. Architectural perfection and visible imperfection both command premium pricing.
But here's what makes Roganic's win particularly significant: when the jury created a separate Sustainability category years ago, it was often seen as a consolation prize—a way to acknowledge eco-conscious design without threatening the "real" competition. In 2025, that's changed. When Atelier E researched Simon Rogan's philosophy before designing the space, they didn't create sustainability theater. They embedded the restaurant's values into its physical structure. The furniture from the old location got new life. The typhoon wood became the centerpiece. Artist Eunis Cheung turned oyster shells into a bar finish.
The result competes aesthetically with any high-tech installation while carrying genuine material stories. In an industry built on experience and memory, spaces with authentic provenance now have an advantage over those built purely for visual impact.
After 17 years, the Restaurant & Bar Design Awards are finally seeing sustainability not as a separate category, but as a design approach capable of standing alongside—and sometimes surpassing—pure spectacle. The question is no longer whether material truth or architectural theater will win. Both already have. The question is which approach will prove more durable as consumers become more discerning about the difference between luxury that performs values and luxury that embeds them.
The Restaurant & Bar Design Awards, now in its 17th year, remains the leading global competition for hospitality design. The 2025 ceremony took place in Dubai.
