Project name: Nene Restaurant
Interior design: Mast Architecture Studio
Design Team: Vlad Gaiduk, Olga Potapova, Alla Ivanova
Location: Moscow, Russia
Photo: Mikhail Loskutov, Daniel Annenkov
Area: 172 sq. m
Year: 2024
Project description from design firms Mast Architecture Studio
Located on Bolshaya Gruzinskaya 76, it’s the latest project by Levchenko brothers—restaurateurs known for their accessible Asian concepts like J’Pan, Ra’Men, Wu Shu, Kook, and the Italian Senti Menti. With Nené, they explore Georgia in a different light.
We rejected the familiar “Georgian beauty”. The interior became a story about the city we visited while building the concept. Parliament buildings and central Tbilisi streets appear in the middle of the hall, clad in raw stone.
The facade opens up into a daytime space. Full-height panoramic glazing fills the room with natural light. Wood is everywhere: balconies, beams, and ceiling structures. Tbilisi is a green city,so in our design, greenery lives on the floor and even parts of the open kitchen.
To us Tbilisi also echoes Paris and Berlin. In the center: traditional wooden chairs and tables—pure Paris. Along the windows: stainless steel seating and salvaged German industrial lights—a nod to the street-side Berlin.
Much of the space is designed from scratch. The bar, tabletops and selected joinery were made according to the custom architectural drawings.
Furniture and lighting are vintage finds, each with its own story. Textiles and ceramics were sourced directly from Tbilisi
Artist Roma Peeks became an integral part of this statement. His works are embedded into the interior — not as decoration, but as part of the architecture itself. Inspired by Georgian animation and street culture, he created his own visual narrative: graphics, glass, mirrors and walls — all fused into a single rhythm.
Roma has particularly drawn inspiration from the Georgian animated film “Baltanosaurs” — a story of a star that sheds a tear, which comes to life and descends to Earth in search of its own. We, too, wander in search of our people and sometimes, like here, we find them.
On the glass a phrase greets everyone coming in from the street:
lights going here / friends / step inside
It’s all about how people and spaces come together when they speak the same language.
Descending the stairs you revealed entirely a different moodin the basement: a shift into the nightlife.
Muted lighting, colored neon, tactile textures and music transform the lower level into a rave-inspired urban club.
This is Tbilisi too — its underground culture, its freedom, its refusal to be framed.
The transition from light to dark, from orderliness to chaos, acts as a spatial portal—a metaphor for duality: day and night, tradition and subversion, form and feeling.
This is not just an interior.
It’s a constructed emotion.
A spatial attempt to capture the restless, bright, complex soul of today’s Georgia — unbound by genre and true to its street-born freedom.
