Winner in the category Restaurant with the project BrassaRia, Casablanca – Morocco
Winner in the category Steakhouse with the project Mussol, Barcelona – Spain
Winner in the category Flooring & Wallcoverings with the project BrassaRia, Casablanca – Morocco
1. Can you tell us more about your Design Firm?
Carlos Martínez Interiors offers a personalized service from the conceptual beginning to the final execution of the project, the design elements and the corporate image. From their studio in Barcelona, they have created more than three hundred outstanding and unique interiors with extensive experience in developing restoration projects. The balance between experience and current events, between use and design, is the objective of the study.
“Our mission is to transform our clients’ businesses through our designs, into a unique experience. Our work must analyze the needs of our clients and combine them with the appropriate aesthetics to offer an added value of authenticity and quality.”
2. What does “design” mean to you?
Design is the process of creative conceptualization of objects, systems and procedures to satisfy aesthetic and functional needs in various areas of knowledge. Having the potential to immerse the user in an experience, making them feel what we want them to feel at all times.
3. Can you describe your design style and its main characteristics?
We don’t really have a set design style, we always base ourselves on the concept that each location requires. In design, not everything goes, from our point of view, each project requires an identity, a late motive, a solid base to be able to represent what it wants to be. Our designs are always conceptual.
Our specialty is inciting desire, lifting spirits and enveloping us with ambient warmth with the visual force of our staging, the rest is the responsibility of the businessman who hires us to convert his bars or restaurants into environments that fit like a glove to the aesthetic tastes of the majority of mortals, introducing them to tasting.
We are addicted to the warmth of aged wood, friendly stuccos and lighting that calmly accommodates the eyes of clients. We create an author’s seal that provides the difference that marks the needs of each business. We walk between the freedom of aesthetics and the dictatorship of marketing, and we equally value the image, location, offer and exhibition of the product as a successful artillery.
4. As the winner of the FoodInSpace Design Awards 2024, what does receiving this award mean to you, your company and your team?
For us, winning this award means recognition of the effort and sacrifice for the execution of our projects. Going to work every day to do what we like most and also being paid for it is gratifying, but also having professional colleagues give you an award like this is absolutely great.
5. What was the biggest challenge for your winning project/projects?
In the Brassaria project in Morocco, the most important challenge was managing the entire execution of the work remotely. It was difficult to carry out this project without being able to feel the finishes, colors, textures, etc. in the work. With site visits every two weeks, when we arrived we never knew what we were going to find. Not being able to control all the details one hundred percent was a significant stress.
Regarding the Mussol project, located in Barcelona, the challenge was our team’s ability to considerably reduce the initial budget to be able to obtain the same image that we proposed from the beginning. It was very satisfying to see the end of the work and the gratitude of our clients.
6. In an increasingly global world, how do you balance local identity with international trends in your design work?
As we have already said, we are not biased at all, we like to create unique spaces that go hand in hand with what is offered in each restaurant, always taking advantage of the entire range of possibilities and construction innovations that the market offers us. That is our goal.
7. Are there any other topics you would like to talk about that were not addressed in these questions?
The universe of things created by man is so vast that in simple everyday life we do not realize the existence of that someone who thought of this or that object, who imagined the solution to a problem; the one who found a way to solve a need, with a needle or a novel.
This idea could bother those who, with lofty pretensions, aspire to exalt design to the status of art, thus believing that they are giving the profession or expression of the designer an ennobled connotation and magnifying their presence in society, without realizing that even art is design.
Thank you for the interview!
Find out more about Carlos Martínez Interiors and its projects!
