Baja Restaurant & Wolf Group offices

Our Projects & Interiors team reconfigured and refurbished a three-storey building, turning a tired old restaurant into a mixed-use retail, restaurant and office space.

We stripped the entire building back to a shell, leaving the new ground floor tenant to complete their shop fitout while building a new Mexican restaurant on the first floor. We enclosed a balcony and installed a new commercial kitchen, building a new central bar and toilets with new floor and wall finishes.

We converted the second floor, previously a bakery and storage space, into offices for the restaurant owners, removing an intertenancy wall and building new offices, refurbishing the bathrooms and redecorating. Outside, we refreshed the façade with decorative cladding, signage and a new entrance door.

Space was at a premium in the busy waterfront location, with the building covering the entire site footprint and the street outside being upgraded. We worked closely with the council contractors to coordinate deliveries and road closures, carefully planning deliveries to maximise the limited laydown areas and storage on site.

We adapted as the design evolved, fabricating some of the joinery, including the booth seating in the restaurant, to ensure that long lead times didn’t throw the tight programme out.

With the building nearing the end of its useful life, we worked closely with the client and their architects both during the design phase and throughout the project to achieve a high-quality result on a very limited budget.