DKO has designed a sun-soaked steak restaurant at Saltlick, the architecture and interior design studio’s first built project in Bali.

Where many other food and beverage venues in Bali lean into the theatrical, Saltlick makes its context the star. Perched above the renowned Ku De Ta beach club, Saltlick takes in Seminyak Beach through frameless panoramic windows and reflects back its radiance.

“We designed this space to come alive with the sunset,” explains DKO director Michael Drescher, the interior designer on the project, adding that Bali enjoys “quite a long sunset”.

The design intent 

Saltlick was a collaborative effort, bringing together the designer, owner, chef and builder in close collaboration. Drescher dialled in to meetings held in three languages from his base in DKO’s Melbourne studio.

The design team’s vision was to create a dining destination that blends local charm with international appeal. They set out to strip back the site of an empty restaurant – which had lived “many lives” – and redesign something new. 

“It has had a few different architects involved. We took a lot of the additions on it and brought it back to this beautiful horizontal simplicity, which links back to where the architecture started from but also to that simplicity of what south-east Asian architecture is, which is about shade and about needing to be cool,” Drescher says.

Ku De Ta pursues cool in both senses of the word. For almost two decades, the beach club has attracted swathes of tourists to its beachfront parties held in the internal courtyard, and to dine and drink cocktails in the surrounding wings of Ku De Ta’s U-shaped building.

The construction of Saltlick had to take place at night to allow the restaurant downstairs to continue operating, as well as to avoid the heat of the day. There were also cultural nuances to be aware of during the development and design process, making collaboration with the local owner all the more essential. For example, Saltlick’s external structures could not have solid closed roofs due to the site’s proximity to nearby temples.

“You can’t sit outside under a solid roof basically because of the temple, so we had to be quite culturally sensitive,” Drescher says.

DKO also had to be cognisant of local attitudes to drinking. The bar and bartenders are not as front and centre as they might be in Australia, with Saltlick’s bar designed more as a large waiting table.

“Alcohol is secondary to the experience. It’s not seeing bottles and bottles and bottles everywhere,” Drescher says.

Simplifying Saltlick

In stage one, DKO pulled the back-of-house prep kitchen, which used to be on the ground level, out from the “unseen” and made the culinary artistry a visible spectacle for onlookers downstairs at Ku De Ta. Saltlick now has multiple kitchens with a walkway that crosses over between them. 

“As the sun sets, it really lights up,” Drescher says.

Each element of the project’s design is crafted to complement the sunlight flooding through the windows. DKO extended out the terrace and designed banquettes perfect for social groups that have views to the beach. Patrons sit around forest-brown marble tables with patterns resembling the rugged veining of their steak dinners, on plates crafted by Royal Bali.

“We spoke about tablecloths for a long time, but why cover up a beautiful piece of stone?” Drescher says.

But it gets very dark as soon as the sun goes down at this night-only establishment. This is when the materials really get to work. 

Besides the black charred timber walls, which take inspiration from the wood-fired cuisine, the prevailing colour palette at Saltlick is brown. The tan leather banquettes, Indonesian timbers and locally sourced, caramel-coloured tiles allow the restaurant to glow after dark.

“It’s that thinking that the sun still carries on,” Drescher says.

Saltlick’s centrepiece is a hand-carved limestone wine bath that is both conveniently located for staff and allows for the display of fancy champagne.

The reviews are in

According to Drescher, Saltlick is doing well. He knows this because he is a self-confessed “fanatic” for reading reviews for all the restaurants, hotels or other public-facing projects his team designs.

“I like to read a review because, for me, as a designer, I need to understand what’s working well and what hasn’t or what we could do better.”

He says Saltlick is fetching five-star reviews that note the food and the comfortable setting.

“Sometimes people don’t know why they love a space or why they’re giving it five stars, but they just feel it and that’s something really hard to design for because it takes a lot of different things,” he says.

In the case of Saltlick, DKO did not feel the need to add many layers and embellishments. The interior elements work towards a simple original intent:

“We wanted to go back to the basics of what made this venue so good: the sunset, the beach, the food,” he says.

Photography supplied by DKO.