By Christy Marshall
Photograph by Katherine Bish
When it came time to design Savor, co-owner and chef Jonathan Schoen gave Diane Zebell a four-point list of what the interior needed to be: (1) elegant, (2) fun, (3) reflective of the restaurant’s world cuisine and (4) appealing to diners of all ages.
The trick was doing it in an old three-story Greek-Revival–façade funeral home (it was built as a residence for the Mayer family at the turn of the century but became the Mayer Funeral Home in 1920). The first floor, Zebell recalls, contained the “most horrendously dark, dreary, spooky, very closed-in private viewing rooms.” Contractors came in and knocked down walls, reconfigured halls, added columns, coved ceilings, installed arches and constructed an addition, a patio, even an elevator. Construction took 27 months.
“My inspiration came from the world cuisine,” Zebell says. “I know that in a restaurant, food is king. The décor can’t take away; it has to enhance. I wanted to create a mood that made people feel that they were somewhere else in the world—without knowing exactly where.” She pored over her international cookbooks to chose her palette. The walls are the colors of wasabi, squash and nutmeg. Copper was used as a neutral and on all of the Florentine wall moldings. The glass in the mirrors is bronzed. Faux-painter Joelle Mitchell used metallic paints. “I wanted that shimmer quality everywhere,” Zebell says. “I also decided that every room would have a visual surprise.”
In one room, it’s a red crystal chandelier; in another, floating harlequin figures are set into wall niches; one fabric includes the circles of the Savor logo; the U-shaped bar has huge claw feet sticking out from beneath the bottles; a steamer trunk serves as a table in the brandy room. The bathrooms are over the top: The women’s room features an old brass chandelier, 6 feet in diameter and beaded, hanging over a 5-foot-wide pouf; the men’s has kudu horns on the walls and a ceiling covered in bamboo shades.
The fun doesn’t end there. On the second floor is the Flim Flam theater, a passion of Schoen’s and father/co-owner Dennis Schoen’s (Nathalie Pettus is the restaurant’s third co-owner). The design for the theater is drawn from the Egyptian Hall in London, which was built in 1812. The walls are lacquered red; the ceiling is covered in fabric; 65 barstools (in three different heights, the shortest up front) are placed at small tables, filling the space facing the stage in what is called a “close-up magic cabaret theater.”
In the bowels of the building, a room with stone walls and exposed brick has been converted into a chef’s table/wine room. Red leopard print covers 16 chairs, and a barrel ceiling is home to a fresco depicting Zebell, Pettus and the Schoens as cheerful cherubs frolicking in the clouds.
