In the run-up to Christmas a couple of years ago, there was just one London restaurant where the fashionable set wanted to have its seasonal celebrations. Across town, in a grungy industrial space above Spitalfields Market, the creative crowd drank Champagne and ate venison on plates specially designed by British fashion darling Giles Deacon. Reindeer, as it was called, was the talk of the town throughout its brief existence, from November to January.
This Christmas, the Reindeer team (Pablo Flack and David Waddington who run a permanent restaurant, Bistrotheque in the East End) have upped the stakes. They are bringing the pop-up concept to Mayfair, and with added flair.
Gone is the log-cabin kitsch. Flash, as this year’s model is called, will be decorated with desirable artworks and Giles Deacon has turned his attention from fancy plates to full-size Swarovksi crystal chandeliers. Architect David Kohn has been brought in to build a room-within-a-room, in the five-metre-high West Room of Burlington House. For Kohn, who has recently completed a sleek and minimal gallery for Stuart Shave on the other side of Oxford Street, this was not quite business as usual. ‘I knew there would be a lot of collaborators, so I had to be bold,’ he says. ‘That’s when I decided to build it out of art packing crates.’
If it seems like a lot of effort to set up a restaurant for a mere 12 weeks, Flash is not alone in opening and closing in, well, a flash. Perhaps it is down to our collectively short-attention spans and constant craving for the new, but shops and art galleries are here today and gone tomorrow. Deliberately.
From Comme des Garcons’ guerrilla stores – the first one popped up in Berlin in 2004 – which now have appeared and vanished all over the world, to the rumoured Bar Bongo that could see artist Carsten Höller working in collaboration with Prada to bring a four-month-only watering hole to London, it seems that we like our experiences short and sweet. Chanel has even created a mobile art gallery with architect Zaha Hadid that, having already landed UFO-like in Hong Kong and Tokyo, pitched up in late October in New York’s Central Park, where it remains only until mid-November.
If it’s a case of blink and you might miss it, then you know you simply have to be there.
Flash is at Royal Academy of Arts, 6 Burlington Gardens, London W1 (+44 (0)20 8880 6111, bookflashnow.com) during 1 November 2008 to 18 January 2009.
