NEWS.am STYLE recently profiled Mikayel Karsyan, founder of IMAGEMAN, under a headline that doubles as a mission statement: restaurant design as dramaturgy. His argument is simple and, in a city with no shortage of new openings, a little provocative — a restaurant today isn't really sold on its food. It's sold on atmosphere, and atmosphere is staged the same way a piece of theatre is staged.
Karsyan, who trained as a painter before turning to interiors, described his process as starting with a name rather than a floor plan. Once a branding partner has settled on what a place is called, the name itself starts dictating the design — its colour palette, its materials, the mood it's allowed to have. Call something 'Red Dragon' and the interior all but designs itself; call the same concept 'Shaolin' and you end up somewhere else entirely, mountains and monks instead of lacquer and fire.
“A restaurant is an opera — music, decor, direction and performance, all working together. Every detail matters.”
The piece walks through several IMAGEMAN projects as case studies. KATSIN — Armenian for 'cleaver' — reads the part literally, its lines, metalwork and sculptural details all built around the idea of a butcher's blade. KTOOR takes its name and its atmosphere from Kond, one of Yerevan's oldest quarters, a tangle of rooftops where one building's balcony is the next one's floor. DARGETT keeps things purposefully lean, letting the brewery do the talking; POMODORO is built to feel like a Neapolitan side street, cracked plaster and all; GRILLIAN leans into an open, wood-fired Balkan kitchen with nothing hidden from the room.
Running underneath all of it is a line Karsyan keeps coming back to: nothing in the room should upstage the room itself. Furniture, lighting, even the tableware are chosen the way instruments are chosen for an orchestra — present, necessary, and never louder than the piece as a whole. He's openly skeptical of interior trends for the same reason; a style everyone is copying this year is, to him, the fastest way for a restaurant to stop feeling like anything in particular.
