Flat Iron, Cambridge

Location
Cambridge

Client
Flat Iron

Status
Complete

Stepping into Flat Iron Cambridge is like entering a dialogue between old and new—an immersive restaurant anchored in the city’s historic heart, yet gently transformed into a contemporary dining destination. Housed across two floors of a striking Victorian building just off Market Square, the design celebrates architectural memory while layering in modern warmth and character.

As we stripped back the previous finishes, hidden gems emerged: tall ceilings, original white-brick tiling, and timber floors, long obscured under carpet and later partitions, were revealed and restored as the foundational canvas. The result is a space that honours the building’s heritage—light, texture, solidity—while embedding new moments of contrast and surprise.

Upstairs, an elevated “not-so-secret garden” forms a refuge within the restaurant, with foliage creeping down the exterior and softening the view beyond. This element becomes a quiet counterpoint to the energy below—a space of calm interlude enhancing the narrative of journey through the restaurant.

In forming the conceptual basis, we leaned on Flat Iron’s own ethos of directness and simplicity: the raw honesty of its signature steak, the tactile pleasure of materials, the integrity of details. That philosophy guided our approach to finishes and furnishing choices: new and old, refined and rough, functional and poetic.

In Cambridge, Flat Iron finds its first home outside London—a project that tightly weaves client identity, context and craft into a restaurant that’s both familiar and fresh.

Photography by Justin De Souza