Brasserie Onni / 2024 / Founded by Samuel Lehto
www.brasserieonni.com
Brasserie Onni is both a restaurant and a living design project — a space where food, design, and atmosphere share a philosophy of honest materials, incremental improvement, and quiet generosity.
Beginning as a way of rebuilding my life around the values my mother left me a few months after she died: making things with care, using what exists, and turning difficulty into something good. Every choice, from the menu to the way the room is built, is guided by warmth, restraint, and self-sufficiency.
The menu follows the same logic: seasonal, small-scale, and built from ingredients that are often overlooked. It shifts with what nature and nearby producers offer, sometimes carrying subtle Asian notes from my years growing up in Hong Kong.
I wanted Brasserie Onni to blur the line between culinary work and spatial design as I see them as coming from the same process. It’s a working example of how aesthetics, sustainability, and daily life can coexist without hierarchy — design as something practiced, not displayed.
The aim was to create a place that feels personal yet public — a modern brasserie rooted in the local landscape. The interior mixes handmade pieces with materials that have lived previous lives, giving the space a tactile, evolving quality rather than a polished one.
Everything at Onni is designed to reduce distance — between guest and host, between design and use, and between what something once was and the shape it takes now. The furniture is made to be lived with, not admired from afar. The lighting shifts through the day. The food is prepared in view. Together, these choices create a rhythm more than a concept — something handmade, human, and quietly alive.
