How we created a BREEAM Excellent restaurant

Family Kitchen, RBG Kew

How we created a BREEAM Excellent restaurant


BREEAM Excellent
Building area 1,150sqm
80% of hot water uses recycled heat from kitchen and dining areas

Working as executive architects to deliver another team’s concept is a way of demonstrating our breadth and versatility: we actively enjoy the challenge of taking a great design and delivering it even better. Just as for projects elsewhere at Kew – including the treetop walkway and arboretum HQ – our aim is to solve problems but safeguard the continuity of the original design.

This project at the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew was designed by HOK to RIBA Stage 3. Located next to the playground at the heart of the site, it’s a new-build 250-cover restaurant designed specifically for families. It has a cross-laminated timber (CLT) structure so, bringing with us the lessons learned at the arboretum HQ, we simplified this to minimise the amount of material needed while still keeping the architecture intact.

With a large production kitchen and a pizza oven in the middle of the space, a major challenge was connected with air conditioning: how could we minimise the amount of mechanical ventilation needed? Despite replacing the proposed oil-based insulation with a thicker mineral wool which has better thermal and fire performance but lower embodied energy, and including more photovoltaic panels on the roof, we were unable to lose the conditioning entirely, but we brought the building to BREEAM Excellent and exceeded the standards set in the brief.

Further small adjustments have improved the functionality of the building – for example, reversing the fall of the roof so that rainwater drains off back-of-house, removing the need for downpipes behind the cladding at the front. We worked with stage-set designers Firecracker to deliver the bespoke internal structures in timber, designed to entertain the restaurant’s smallest guests and educate them in the value of healthy eating.