La Otra mexican restaurant Tlv | Kne'kash Living Materials

The owners of La Otra, the hip restaurant recently opened at the Tel-Aviv Imperial Hotel, are known for their ingenuity. With their Imperial cocktail bar - which not long ago was ranked the world’s 17th best bar - they showed that their culinary agenda is based on solid tradition, without succumbing to common cliches. La Otra walks the same path - a restaurant with an unmistakably Mexican menu, but one that is innovative and exciting rather than obvious and mundane.
The restaurant’s design reflects this spirit exactly. In charge of it are designers Elad Cohen (a partner at the Nir Swissa and Elad Cohen design firm) and Reut Male-Ron (an independent designer). For them, Mexico is not Sombrero hats, steelpans and pastel colours; they derive their inspiration from the dark, not-touristic side of Mexico: Voodoo rituals, shady temples, Día de Muertos, caves and cemeteries.
The restaurant’s technical constraint - the small space (only 65m²) and low ceiling - was turned by the designers into an advantage, and they use it to amplify the restaurant’s gloomy character. True to their craft agenda, the designers decided to costume-design all the space’s design elements.
The intended atmosphere of a dense, dark Mexican cave demanded the designers to make the design elements not separately, but as one big object - and so they needed one specialist to be in charge of almost every part of the restaurant. The chosen company, Kne Kash, was therefore called for a complex, challenging work.
One such complex element is the restaurant’s entrance. The wooden deck at the small porch is drawn into the restaurant, where it covers the lower part of the wall and even stretches inside and transformed into the hostess’s work-station. It ends with a peripheral bench covered with a costume-made embroidered upholstery. The same wooden deck wraps the restaurant’s central design piece: the cave wall. The designers couldn’t find a real stone to fit their vision, so they decided to create it themselves. An artist was chosen to sculpt the complex wall from metal nets stretched on a wooden construction, that is then filled with painted cement. In order to amplify the dark atmosphere, In this same wall the designers placed a series of small niches to fit lightning.
True to The Imperial bar origins, the bar was given a central place in the restaurant design, just in front of the smoky red iron door, and it is the restaurant’s focal point and can be seen from every part of it.

Kne'kash focuses on the  implementation of living materials in

architecture and design- in order to materialize the vision of the architect.

We believe in integrating materials and textures such as bamboo, recycled wood

concrete, metal and weavings by reduction to essentials. Materials are worked with a particular

care and respect, interweaving in their most basic natural form. By reduction and decreasing in

the sense that less is more,  the raw elements naturally embedded in living materials come to light.