Park Avenue Summer has returned to the Upper East Side of Manhattan, just in time to herald the season’s arrival. This original concept brings to life the seasonal premise of the restaurant with a physical design, cuisine, and beverage program that completely change with the season.

The team behind midtown rustic American restaurant Quality Meats collaborated to create Park Avenue Summer. Restaurateur Michael Stillman joins forces with award-winning design firm AvroKO (Public, Stanton Social) on the concept and all aspects of architecture, design, and graphics of the new restaurant.

All physical components for the four Park Avenue projects were born from one key necessity: transformability. To effectively change both the mood and the architectural details of the space, several systems of receptacles were devised throughout the restaurant. Custom steel wall frames surround the space and were built to accept differing seasonal panels. These panels not only have unique materials for each season, ranging from wood, to porcelain, to mirror, but also have unique architectural details that affect the style of the space overall. AvroKO endeavored to design a space with a sense of discovery, rather than focus on creating stereotypical, physical manifestations of a “season.” This led to using Captain James Cook’s explorative travels as a loose design reference. The designers researched the regions he had visited in each of his major expeditions as a way of framing each season.

Summer in particular has references from the Galapagos Islands, envisioned through a classic, naturalist’s lens, and then reinterpreted with a modernist’s sensibilities. Forty hand-cast tortoise shells are mounted throughout the space on high gloss lacquered panels as part of a custom steel frame system that will change seasonally. Cook’s original maps are utilized as a departure point for the identity, menu graphics, and wine labels. Reclaimed, whitewashed wood from a coastal town also forms portions of the ceiling planes, doors and cabinets.