Davide Nanni winced.
The restaurant lights were bright, brighter than he liked, and Nanni hates bright lights — he can’t stand direct, revealing illumination.
Just after he moved to Chicago in 1996 from his native Italy, a light bulb in his Pilsen apartment was so bright that he decided to build a shade. It was one of his first designs. His materials included a bicycle chain and pipes from a hot-water heater.
Not standard lamp materials, but nothing he creates seems especially obvious, as he will tell you. He is not modest: During a day spent with Nanni, visiting his restaurant designs, he said many times that what we were seeing was unique and extraordinary, unlike anything else in Chicago dining. Which had the ring of an unrestrained ego, yet he wasn’t wrong. Nanni’s designs are unexpected and indirect, to say the least. Indeed, many of the light bulbs in the handful of restaurants he has designed are black at the bottom, copper-dipped to redirect glare.
As we entered Ruxbin in Ukrainian Village, however, the lighting was bright because the restaurant was closed. It was noon on a Tuesday; Nanni never intended the dining room to be seen on a Tuesday afternoon, with its lighting undimmed, without the shadows and muted intimacy he built into Ruxbin’s striking design.
He looked around, looked at co-owner Jen Kim, who was making him a cup of coffee, and said in his thick Torino purr, “This place! This place! It is like seeing the women you spent the night with but you see her the next morning in the daylight and now you are like, ‘Who is this woman beside me? I do not know you!'”
“Niiiice,” Kim said, laughed and handed him a coffee cup, which he cradled as he paced about, inspecting.
Everything here was once something else. This is Nanni’s aesthetic, his signature — recycled materials, shaped into something startling.
“Ergonomically conceived out of garbage,” as he puts it.
He ran a hand along the frosted glass that divides the restaurant’s entrance from its dining room. This glass was recovered from a DJ booth. And the dining booths were made with old church pews; the lighting scrims were once theater seats. He spread the arms and legs of the seats apart and attached them to posts, linking the booths. Like many of his designs, this resembles a gazebo — that or a train compartment, circa 1900.
His latest design is for the Italian restaurant Ombra in Andersonville, expected to open Feb. 8. Its dining room also will resemble a kind of vintage train, with long aisles that divide wooden compartments. The wood is from a gymnasium floor (that was being replaced) in Berwyn, the leather cushions are thrift-store leather jackets.
“The amount of detail he goes into is crazy,” said Tim Rasmussen, co-owner of Ombra (as well as Acre, next door). “The whole thing has taken longer partly because of it. He obsesses, he constantly refines. He is a romantic about his art.
“I actually built in more time (to finish the restaurant) because I knew he couldn’t deliver a Chevy, only a tricked-out BMW. So no, I don’t see his work taking off everywhere. Control-freak restaurant owners would not work well with him. He needs the right client, someone naive or willing to let go. I call it the Davide factor. If he says he’ll give you brilliance in four weeks, think eight. But it will be brilliant.”
‘A huge risk’
The owners of Ruxbin — Kim, along with chef Edward Kim and his sister Vicki (who are not related to Jen Kim) — never owned a restaurant. They wanted something functional, creative, but warm. The space they found on Ashland Avenue was perfect. Its restroom, though, was too close to its kitchen. One day, hunting around the West Town decorating-design shop Salvage One, they met Nanni, its manager and resident designer. He told them about the other restaurants he had done around Chicago. Which, truthfully, wasn’t that many.
But they liked him. “So we took a huge risk on him,” Jen Kim said, “and he took a risk on us.”
Nanni has no formal training as a designer or architect. He drew a floor plan and discussed it with them. That’s about it.
Then he built them one of the most eye-catching dining spaces in Chicago. And because most of the materials were acquired from abandoned or remodeled buildings, and because Nanni constructed the dining room with help from young artists willing to work for cheap, the final cost was only about $22,000, he said. Which is remarkable, especially considering that after Ruxbin opened in 2010 and went on to be widely praised (Bon Appetit named it one of the best new restaurants of 2011), the design was as discussed as the food.
Ruxbin also helped establish Nanni’s reputation as a distinctive voice in Chicago restaurant design. Previously, under the banner of AlterEgo Form, the now-defunct design firm he ran with two former business partners, he had worked only on two bars, Simone’s in Pilsen and the Boiler Room in Logan Square. But with Ruxbin, now you knew a Nanni dining room when you ate in one, even if you had no idea who designed it. He had a look: ingenious use of recycling, steampunk-esque (yet streamlined) appearance. To stand inside Simone’s is to feel as if you are in a pinball machine; even the Boiler Room, his least dazzling room, looks less like a bar than like the employee break room on a deep-space mining frigate, a la “Alien.”
“Ruxbin is really great, and that design does have something to do with it,” said Jason Hammel, co-owner of Lula and Nightwood. “It would be great if it were in a bowling alley, but its design and its food are so nicely in tandem. Man, we need new blood in (restaurant design) — how many exposed bolts are we going to get?”
Free to be crazy
Nanni is 43 and works and lives in West Town, which is perfect, a place full of elegant decay and rusted metal that’s aged and brown, looking like trash at first only to reveal itself, on second glance, as sculpture. Or vice versa.
He came to the front door of Salvage One with a cup of coffee in hand and unlatched the lock and said, there in the hallway, “The reason I work in the restaurant business at all is because it gives me the freedom to be crazy. I see it almost as an ad for myself. Why be in a gallery when a restaurant can be art?
“I don’t like much restaurant design, actually. Chicago (designers) are picking at the pieces of other cities! That’s what I see when I go to restaurants, which is depressing. They go to New York, London. They pick ideas here and there then bring those back here. The thing is that everyone ends up doing the same things.”
He sipped his coffee, winced and said with the face of a man very sad to have to deliver bad news, “There is no personality to Chicago restaurants. There is nothing unique here. Nobody will say anything personal.”
We walked to his fourth-floor studio. Just inside the entrance, we passed an enormous desk, created for an advertising company that went out of business. He took it back. Like a lot of his designs, at first you smile; the desk is huge and weird and barely resembles furniture. Your next urge is ask what it is made from. It is made from a bank-teller window and old film strips; the monitor cabinet looks like a laser gun; also included is a hologram of a seashell, mailboxes fitted with camera lenses, fiberglass with ivy vines growing inside it.
Again, this is a reception desk.
His studio is a cluttered riot of dust, wood, cigarette boxes, coffee cups. At the center is an enormous swing chair, held in place by a large looping half-circle of wood; on his drawing board are the plans for a restaurant incubator. He reached for what appeared to be an accordion and undid a latch and unfolded it and what looked like a miniature puppet stage came into view, evoking thoughts of a children’s pop-up book.
“My presentation kit,” he said.
Between the curtains of the tiny stage, words and pictures from proposals stream upward, pulled through the stage thanks to a hand crank.
Then he folded up the whole thing and slung the strap attached to it over his shoulder and smiled.
The skeptic
“Davide is one of those amazing people whose mind is always going in multiple directions,” said Jane Rodak, the owner of Salvage One. “Which also means that he can get really exhausting to talk to, because he can’t get ideas out fast enough. And those ideas! His vision is not what everyone would like. I don’t see him with a ton of restaurants, despite the buzz around him. He’s not that interested in promoting himself.”
Indeed, Nanni has no plans to be a restaurant designer, and he doesn’t care to be thought of one, and he has no desire to design many restaurants. He doesn’t want to spread himself too thin, he said.
“I want to work in my style,” he said later, standing in Ruxbin. “I want that freedom only. I mean, look at this. This is all one thing. It feels like one piece. You stand not inside a restaurant but a sculpture. Because I’m a sculptor.”
Jen Kim was skeptical of this.
When Nanni started, he wallpapered the ceilings with cookbook pages. Then plastered the walls with orange apple-juice crates. As Kim watched him do this, she got nervous.
“It was very orange,” she remembered.
He installed on the back wall an X-ray machine salvaged from the old Lincoln Park Hospital. And when it came to the restroom, he had an original solution: Instead of a door, he added the cylindrical entrance from a darkroom — you don’t enter Ruxbin’s restroom; you wrap the door around yourself, then find yourself inside.
“My thing was, ‘What if we get drunk people who can’t figure that out?'” Jen Kim said. “But Davide is such a schmoozer: ‘Trust me,’ he’d say. ‘Trust me.’
“We trusted him. Incredibly — to be honest — it worked out.”
Nanni is an operator, smooth, magnetic, often dressed in thin leather jackets and hoodies. He looks like a thinner Hugh Jackman. Restaurateur Michael Noone, who hired Nanni for Simone’s, said that when they went to see the empty space, Nanni said: “‘I smell bread here.’ And I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ He said, ‘You need to build a bakery here.’ I said, no, a bar. Then as I walked away, I thought ‘Maybe I should do a bakery.’ Then, I was like, ‘No, no! What am I thinking? It’s going to be a bar.’ He’s very convincing.”
A Gold Coast architect (who asked not to be identified) hired Nanni last year to design a game room in his basement. Nanni gave something resembling the submarine hull in “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” with dark, scooped wooden walls and secret doors and phonograph speakers and, hidden beneath a large hatch, a dart board.
The architect’s wife told me, “My husband likes steampunk and said, ‘Just let Davide go with his vision.’ I said, ‘What exactly is that?’ And husband goes, ‘That’s the thing. You just have to go with it.'”
Nanni grew up in what he describes as “a loser family.” Although, when I ask what he means he explains the kind of family that is always ready to help other people, never asks for help in return and never gets any. He is quick to add that his father worked in the ice cream business in Torino, his mother owned a home decorating store and he was not poor. He worked in an advertising firm in Italy, specializing in marketing, a job which, he says now, forced him to be manipulative. He deeply regrets this, he said. On the other hand, the job brought him here.
He was sent to study international business at the University of Chicago, but while taking a summer course at Columbia College, he ended up marrying one of his teachers (they have since divorced) and left advertising. He moved to Pilsen, where, as he puts it, he noticed a pile of garbage one day and tried to build something from it. While working in restaurants around Chicago — getting $3,700 in tips “and five phone numbers in one night,” he boasts — he started to gain a reputation around the neighborhood for his designs. People would leave their trash outside his tiny garage studio, he said: “Sacrifices to the gods of the arts.”
Like a lot of what he says, it is hard to tell if he is kidding. He is deeply earnest, casually frank. At 19th Street in Pilsen, where his first large piece, a Tim Burton-ish gazebo, still stands in the garden behind a row of apartment buildings, he said, looking at the rusting hulk, “I hate how my babies are treated.” Then we left for Simone’s, of which he had told me: “It is a beautiful place that serves crappy food. It’s like I gave them the body of a Ferrari and they put it on a Dodge Neon.” (Noone, on the other hand, said Nanni’s AlterEgo partners were just as instrumental to building Simone’s dining room; Nanni never once mentioned them.)
Nevertheless, the place is remarkable. Tables were built from old pinball machines. The bar back swoops and curls away from the wall like a wave. The DJ booth is partly wrapped in an old “Space Invaders” game, and a second bar is ornamented with beakers and chalkboards pulled from Westinghouse College Prep.
We sat. “Look,” Nanni said, leaning in, “I can only create about 5 percent of what I dream. Why? Because of time, because of money, what I can spend and what people will spend.” He waved his hands, defeated.
I asked for an example of the other 95 percent.
“Dreams,” he said. “What comes to me in bed, at night. You understand? Dreams?”
Where to see Davide Nanni designs
Ruxbin, 851 N. Ashland Ave.; 312-624-8509
Ombra, 5308 N. Clark St.; 773-334-7600; slated to open Feb. 8
Simone’s, 960 W 18th St.; 312-666-8601
The Boiler Room, 2210 N. California Ave.; 773-276-5625
