American Oak Project

American Oak Project

Warm American oak veneer for “Het Industriegebouw” in Rotterdam.

The building where Héroine, a restaurant and cocktail bar in Rotterdam, is located is a venerable modernist monument from the post-war reconstruction era of Rotterdam, designed by Hugh Maaskant and Willem van Tijen. The building had been neglected in recent decades before the current owner purchased it in 2015 and embarked on a true renaissance of the modernist values that made the building great in the first place.

Modiste was honored to design a restaurant and bar for a young, fearless trio of hospitality entrepreneurs in one of the most challenging spaces in “Het Industriegebouw.” A large 270 m2 space in a wing of the building that had seen considerable decay from the late 1970s and 1980s. The goal from the start was to honor the building’s origins and restore the space to its raw structural elements of concrete, metal window frames, and open plan as intended in the original design.

We were left with a large open space with many scars from the past that we decided to preserve. From here, we wanted to create a lush 1970s atmosphere while remaining firmly within the modernist design tradition of the building. This was primarily inspired by the vibrant and stylistic cuisine of Héroine’s chef, Mr. Michael Schook, but we also wanted to prove a point about the modernist design idiom itself. While most people think of the classical white cubist feats of Le Corbusier and our Dutch hero Gerrit Rietveld, we could not help but let wooden paneling, enormous planters, and decadent chrome from Warren Platner in the 1970s speak. The result is a balanced mix of simplicity and drama, a juxtaposition of essential and luxurious in both design, materials, and finishing to show that modernism still had a trump card, according to Modiste.