The Most Beautiful Rooms to Book for Dinner

Make a Reservation for the Room

A beautiful dining room can make a persuasive case before anyone has tasted the food. The 15th Restaurant and Bar Design Awards offered several places worth booking for the view alone. Luma, inside Adelaide's Playford hotel, glows beneath a huge LED ceiling feature by Melbourne studio Hachem, its curling form inspired by the hotel's Art Nouveau emblem. Other winners included Frescohallen in Bergen by Claesson Koivisto Rune and Tanu, a shimmering cafe and ice creamery in Odesa by local studio Sivak+Partners. Three very different rooms, each certain that lighting belongs on the menu.

When Ettore Sottsass Nearly Left Design

Ettore Sottsass is remembered for bringing color, wit and a philosophical streak to ordinary objects, but his camera was as important as his sketchbook. Design Metaphors at Triennale Milano concentrates on photographs made between 1972 and 1978, a period when Sottsass came close to abandoning design. He spent those years thinking, drawing and photographing in his Milan studio and across mountains and deserts. Architecture and landscape dominate the images, which read like quiet studies of how people arrange themselves in the physical world. The exhibition reveals the looking that came before the objects.

Notes From the Guest List

For Perrier's 160th anniversary, Philippe Starck introduced the first new silhouette in the green bottle's history. The ridged surface came from a childhood memory of gripping the famously smooth glass with both hands, afraid it might slip.

At Highclere Castle, known to television viewers as Downton Abbey, Lady Carnarvon's plan to revive the estate vineyard produced its first 900 bottles of sparkling rosé from Chardonnay grapes. The ambition is to reach 4,000 bottles in later vintages.

Patricia Urquiola and Kvadrat launched Sport, an upholstery textile made entirely from ocean-bound plastic. In California, Blunk Space brought Adam Pogue and Martino Gamper together after both spent time at J.B. Blunk's former home and studio. Gamper assembled furniture from discarded wood and offcuts, while Pogue hand-stitched salvaged textiles. The materials differ, but the instinct is shared: use what another maker might have passed over.