Felice Restaurant, Astana

A premium-class Italian restaurant in Astana: a panoramic hall above the river, the olive and music halls, a private dining room, a cigar room, a bar area, a terrace and seven washrooms.

The interior is bespoke and material-heavy — curved ceiling planes, veneered walls, stained-glass panels, hand-assembled light fittings. Each zone runs on its own set of materials and its own furniture; a single specification covering the whole venue does not exist here.

For a contractor that is not one order but a hundred and two line items bought simultaneously in seven countries, where one late line stops the finishing of an entire zone.

The interior is the work of the project's designer, and DIVIO claim no authorship of it. Our role began where the drawing ended: turning an author's decision into a specification, finding the makers for it, and delivering without losses in shade or texture.

Some items cannot be bought — they are made for the project.

The branch-shaped door handles were cast, forged and assembled in a workshop from the interior designer's drawings: up to 1500 mm tall on 2900×600 mm leaves — some pieces in bronze, others in patinated stainless steel. Twelve sets for single-leaf doors, three for double, plus eleven wall-mounted plant bowls Ø300 mm and a ceiling branch installation sized to the ceiling recess. The pattern repeats the branches on the ceiling and in the stained glass. No serial equivalent exists.

Everything else was selected in the country of production. Every item with a colour or a texture went through a physical sample sign-off: the shade of the velvet, the ash stain matched to an approved walnut sample, the clarity of the crystal, the evenness of the galvanised bronze. That closes the risk which in a premium interior costs more than logistics — shade and texture drifting between batches of the same material.

With natural stone the risk is not closed but accepted. The German stone-veneer supplier states it in the offer itself: variation in colour, texture and pattern cannot be ruled out, because the material is natural. Fifty-five square metres of slate on a flexible backing were accepted on that tolerance deliberately — the alternative is a printed imitation, and on a venue of this level it shows.

Not everything is worth shipping. The bar, reception desk and cigar-room worktops and fronts — polished onyx and white marble 20 mm thick, 7.78 m² across six pieces cut to specific dimensions — were bought and fabricated in Astana: a local works takes on both fabrication and installation, and the lead time and breakage risk over a 4000 km leg are out of proportion to any saving on the slab.

Engineering requirements travelled in the same contour. Weitzer Parkett flooring in commercial use requires a protective finish applied on site immediately after installation and cleaning — a manufacturer's condition rather than a recommendation, and it went into the contractor's specification together with the material.