Tristan du Plessis’ Stunning New Miami Restaurant

WORDS Steve Smith PHOTOS Natelee Cocks

The South African interior designer’s latest project is a spectacular rooftop Supper Club called Giselle. It opened in March and is located  in downtown Miami’s bustling District 11.

Known locally for his work designing interiors for restaurants like Fyn, and Alice & Fifth, and the Gorgeous George hotel, Tristan’s Joburg-based interior architecture firm Tristan du Plessis Studio has also completed over 15 international projects to date, from Rome and Normandy to Dubai and Bahrain.

The latest of these is in Miami and it’s a space that has Tristan’s unmistakable stamp – part re-imagined classism-with-a-twist-of-Deco, part retro-futurist, and a little bit of a rock ‘n roll edge in there somewhere too. We chatted to Tristan about Giselle – a new restaurant located above E11even – one of the biggest nightclubs in the USA.

Given how original and imaginative your work is, I’m always fascinated by what briefs you get from clients. What did they ask for with Giselle?

The brief was to create an over-the-top and unapologetically glamorous dining experience, providing lots of eye-candy and moments of discovery. The client wanted to have a dynamic outdoor space that could close in a few seconds when rain came and open right back up when it cleared. They also wanted an intimate internal fine-dining area that felt like a dreamscape from which you could comfortably view the madness that is downtown Miami’s nightlife.

And how did you interpret that request?

The design was largely driven by the location, E11even is a high-energy, star-studded nightclub with the biggest rappers and DJ’s in the world performing every weekend. It’s highly theatrical and extremely high-energy, so Giselle was intended to be a complimentary  pre-cursor to the late-night Miami experience.

We wanted the space to feel glamorous but with a gritty edge beneath the surface. The bathrooms are a good example of this … we flew New York-based street artist Bisco Smith to “vandalize” every surface in the bathrooms, which feels more akin to walking into an art installation than a restaurant toilet.

The walls were panelled in traditional French Boiserie installed in a very untraditional way, and then further blown way out-of-proportion in the fine-dining room. We wanted to lean into expected luxury features and twist them into something new and unexpected.  The branding was created by our longstanding collaborators Jana+Koos; and we also wove graphic elements into the design, like the hand-painted motifs on individual tiles with Kalki Ceramics in Durban. 

What brands did you work with for the furniture, lighting, and soft furnishings?

We worked with Cape Town-based Guideline MNF to custom-make most of the Furniture, along  with some of Haldane Marti’s chairs on the terrace. We used fabrics from Dedar Milano, wall lights from Paris-based Garnier & Linker, pendant by Lee Broom from London, as well as lamps by Apparatus Studio in New York (on the bar) and LA-based Kelly Wearstler (on the chef’s counter)  to add touches of sophistication in this over-the-top space.

It’s been amazing to see your career take off like it has, shining such a bright light on the design talent we have here in SA … so what’s next, Tristan?

At the moment, pretty much all of my current projects are international … I’m working on two more projects in Miami and full hotel design projects in Dubai, Riyadh, Jeddah, Tuscany, Salzburg and many restaurants around the world. Locally I’m doing two homes in Joburg and a spa in Franschhoek.

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