Candy pink Formica surfaces help channel the look of a 1950s cafe inside this vegan pizza place in west London. Humble Pizza is situated on King’s Road, a boutique-lined street in London’s affluent Chelsea neighbourhood, and boasts a menu of exclusively plant-based pizzas. Its almost entirely pink interiors have been designed by Child Studio to emulate the aesthetic of the workmen’s cafes, which sprung up across London in the 1950s. These cafes served no-frills food and drink and typically featured pastel-coloured surfaces made from Formica – a laminated composite material invented in 1912.
A candy-pink seating banquette runs towards the rear of the cafe, where a partition with a recessed rectangular opening looks through to a forest-green kitchen. The top and bottom of the opening have been fitted with lights to draw attention to the chefs at work, creating a “cinematic focal point”.
The hospitality design studio have added newspapers that have been hung intermittently across the walls and an array of pink ornaments that line the shelves. A vintage lamp and a neon text sign denoting the cafe’s slogan have also been included as extra visual nods to the past. Pink also extends to the front facade of the eatery, which was stripped back to reveal the original timber panelling and ironwork. This is the true meaning that retail is detail.
