Ristorante Serrae – case study

Serrae is the Michelin-starred restaurant at Villa Fiesole, looking out over Florence. The site handles two distinct occasions, dinner at the table and aperitivo, with different audiences, hours and expectations.

The constraint that shaped the project

At this level the design has to get out of the way. The photographs of the dining room and the view are the argument; everything else is a frame. Every added element — a banner, an animation, a coloured box — takes attention away from the one thing the visitor came to see. This is a project where the work consists mostly of deciding what not to include.

How it works

• Table booking for dinner, the main path.
• A separate booking for aperitivo, which is another occasion and another audience: someone coming up for a drink at sunset is not booking dinner.
• A gallery of the room and the view over the city, front and centre and without visible compression.
• The kitchen and the Michelin recognition.

The part you do not see

When photography is the argument, image quality and loading time become the same decision, and they pull in opposite directions. A badly compressed view over Florence communicates the exact opposite of what the restaurant stands for; a gallery that takes ten seconds to appear gets abandoned first. The balance has to be found image by image, not with one setting applied to all of them.