La Condesa Mexican Cantina in Perth by Kate Archibald Interiors.

When designing La Condesa, a Tulum meets SoCal Mexican cantina in Perth’s historic Subiaco neighbourhood, Kate Archibald alongside her client—chef and restaurateur Clint Nolan—envisioned a visually rich venue to match the spicy cocktails and flavourful food.

What eventuated was something more refined than pastiche. “The fit-out ended up more paired back, but we still used texture, pattern and colour as key design drivers,” Kate elaborates.

She worked in collaboration with a series of close craftspeople to create custom furniture pieces and foster a unique sense of identity for La Condesa. “The high timber and tiled table tops we designed especially for the fit out, Christian Dillion, a friend of mine, did a beautiful job of executing the timber frames and Clint’s very talented brother Luke, an excellent tiler, tiled the tops,” Kate continues. “We also worked with Kristen and Ash from Painted Earth, who hand-applied incredible paint finishes on the walls that mimic limewash paint finishes.”

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The majority of the tables were custom designed while other furniture pieces were sourced from Australian suppliers such as Design by Them, who supplied the Piper bar stools. Kate and her team gave them a little custom edge, dipping the stools in blue to create little “socks”.

In following Clint’s wish to reuse and re-appropriate as much as possible in the fit-out, Kate retained the existing bar, its existing marble bar top and the existing floor tiles. “Retaining these elements and creating these constraints meant we had to be quite tactical about the design and how we overlaid our design over these existing elements,” she explains.

The interior is a rich mix of caramel textures and patterns with pops of colour to contrast. A traditional Mexican oil cloth was used as a curtain over the kitchen pass, the highly reflective blue gingham textile looking almost plastic. This combination of high gloss textures against matt finish terracotta and limewash-look walls is just part of what makes this simple interior so rich.

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[Images courtesy of Kate Archibald Interiors. Photography by Jack Lovel.]