The Fiddler café fitout

The Fiddler is an entertainment venue with bistro, bars, indoor and outdoor dining areas as well as a wood fired pizzeria. They also have function spaces for weddings and other events.

The Fiddler management wanted to provide a café service offering to their customers. The amenities they had available were not able to provide the experience they wanted to offer. They had a coffee machine on a bar in a cramped area which was affecting their service in the Main Verandah Bar. It was not an efficient set up to cope with the demand.

With a new apartment being built on the site and also current patrons wanting coffee service, The Fiddler saw an opportunity to expand their service offering by asking us to help build a new café in an unused bar area.

After the new café design was mocked up by an interior designer, we set about investigating if the design would actually work. This is an important part of our process for building a new space, as a design on paper may not work in a real world. This gives us an opportunity to investigate avenues to improve a design which is always a critical factor of a successful project installation. Many design faults from initial drawings can be overcome through this process and redesigned before costly rectifications need to be made.

In our discovery phase we found a hidden concrete beam in the existing structure. This meant that we needed to re-think the entire workspace and under bench fridge area design from the provided drawings wouldn't work. We also found there was going to be insufficient fridge space for the custom built Moo Bar milk taps fridge as well as non-compliance for height clearances. A complete redesign of all the cabinetry was required to accommodate a much larger three door commercial fridge as well as maintain sufficient storage. We also designed space for a POS and introduced some waste bins which had not been considered in the design plans provided to us.

On the exterior, the specified cladding material was a signage product and not suitable for the application of a public service area. We suggested an alternative façade cladding in Alucobond, used for multiple commercial applications which has a great finish.

We demolished the existing bar and all services, keeping in mind the patrons of The Fiddler, to ensure their experience was not affected while we were working. Our work included closing and creating doorway openings and refinishing all walls & ceiling lining finishes. A new epoxy floor was laid, together with new cabinets and stone benchtops. Custom made, kiln dried, hardwood shelving was suspended from the ceiling by polished brass rods. We were also able to provide the electrical and data services as part of our internal skillset.

Even with the extensive design changes we needed to make at the start of the project, we were able to deliver the new café, Fid & Co, to our client in just eight weeks. This was made possible because of our excellent relationships with suppliers and our specialist teams. Also our ability to carry out the majority of the work in house, means dealing with only minimal specialist external trades.