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Café? Bistro? Wine bar? How Billiani’s design suit the many faces of Wilma Wunder

Enchilada Group’s Wilma Wunder restaurant chain takes on many faces, and the latest opening in Cologne is no exception. This is how Billiani’s design suits every occasion…

Depending on the time of day, Wilma Wunder can take the form of a café, a bistro, a restaurant or a wine bar – as the day goes on, the location transforms itself to best fulfil the needs of a varying clientele. With a permanently evolving space, offering an urban cuisine of local products and homemade specialties, the interior design and fit out of the space offered a challenge, as well as an opportunity.

Already present in many German cities, Wilma Wunder is the innovative chain of eateries from Enchilada Group, one of the largest food companies in Germany. The latest restaurant is present in major cities of Cologne, Düsselfdorf, Stuttgart and Dresden. Not just a contemporary pub, Wilma Wunder is a charismatic concept with a strong sense of environmental responsibility – to the extent that it has adopted a bee colony to serve its own honey and support sustainable beekeeping.

Singular and eccentric, all Wilma locations are immediately recognisable thanks to the interior design from Mirco Cavallo’s Superstudio21 interior practice. Cavallo‘s philosophy of design comes from an ability to think and see in colour – developed as a child when he was surrounded by the wonderful objects of his esteemed antique-collecting father. The resulting interior concepts from his studio channel a sense of dreamlike wonder and the products specified within these spaces always need to conform for this aesthetic, while offering a grounded and practical sense of function.

A love for detail and an eye for the distinct, Cavallo naturally chose Billiani products to make the trip across the Alps, bringing their Made In Italy label across to Germany.

Why Billiani for this project? Cavallo remarked that the brand as being “ready to experiment with any proposal, flexible in the continuous search for quality and perfection, with a focus on subtraction rather than thickening”, which led to the delivery of all seats for the Wilma Wunder project.

Where sophistication meets a hint of playfulness – the Spy and Croissant arm and lounge chairs were chosen, both of which come from the mind of architect and designer Emilio Nanni. These two chairs can furnish the most chic dining and lounge areas designers can come up with – making them a great selection for the Wilma.

The high tables in Wilma are housed within a more rustic context of patchwork tiles and pots and pans cheekily suspended from the ceiling. For this space, the original café barstools have been selected, designed by the late, great Werther Toffoloni. The high level of customisation possible with these barstools allowed Cavallo to experiment with the combination of different fabrics, leathers and colours.

Thanks to the huge variety of Billiani products available, Superstudio21 was able to fit out the Wilma Wunder spaces perfectly to a tee. The clean design of Billiani’s chairs suit the space without overpowering the unique and playful interior design concepts – ensuring the eye-catching space is a hero of the design while being functional and supporting to the guests to visit, no matter the time of day.

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