Assignment

Um Segredo (‘a secret’ in Portuguese) is a secret dinner club created by the world-famous chef David Santos. Every once in a while David hosts parties at his private residences. The location is always kept a great secret and nobody, except for the invited guests, knows where the event will take place. The events are small-scale, with no more than fifteen guests, and are very accessible. David carefully picks the guests so they always feel comfortable with one another and always have something to talk about.

The main purpose of Um Segredo is to be a ground for culinary experiments. David likes to try something new and unusual and only Um Segredo can give him full freedom to express himself gastronomically.

My assignment was to create a branch of this club in Minneapolis, a place where David Santos would host his events.

Program

The program includes three elements: the Secret Club, Grocery Store, and David’s Private Residence. The Grocery store serves the community, and, on the event day, it supplies the host with ingredients. The boundaries between the three programmatic elements will need to be fluid and adapt to various use scenarios.

Pubic-Private

On a non-event day, the private residence is completely separate from the grocery store where business runs as usual. On the event day, the guests enter the empty grocery store while all the lights in the building are out, except for one luminous shelf with spices. It marks the hidden passage to the Secret Dining club. Then, the shelves open, revealing the secret room behind. If the chef has a sudden strike of imagination during cooking and he needs an additional ingredient, he does not have to go far because everything is right at hand.

Indoor-Outdoor

The glass walls on the opposite side of the secret door are reconfigurable. The chef can shrink the space for a more private atmosphere or expand the space and host a large event. He can even fold these walls completely and open his living room to the backyard for an outdoor event. I developed an interactive physical model to demonstrate how it works and I also found a firm that manufactures such systems.