Rama Estudio Paints a Yellow Path Through a Mostly Underground Office Canteen in Quito

Corporate canteens rarely get much design attention. They are usually treated as a service line items problem: seats per square meter, a kitchen pass, washable surfaces, done. DECK, completed in 2018 by Rama Estudio in Tower #4 of the Ekopark corporate center in Quito, starts from that same brief. It is a 290 m² dining room for office workers, designed to handle between 400 and 600 people a day. It also has a serious handicap: about 70% of the space sits on the underground level, with little daylight and limited natural ventilation.

The interesting part is how the studio's team, Carla Chávez, Felipe Donoso and Carolina Rodas, turned those constraints into the project's identity. They did not try to disguise the basement. They kept the concrete shell, the waffle slab and the ductwork in view, then laid a single strong idea over it: a glossy yellow route through the room, a stepped plywood terrace that works as both seating and a place to linger, and a restaurant that also has to function as an after-office hangout. With a Universidad de las Américas campus nearby, the room serves executives in the morning and students in the afternoon, and the design has to work for both.

A Yellow Line That Does the Planning

The yellow floor is the most memorable move here, and it starts from maintenance. About 80% of the floor is polished concrete, and the remaining 20%, the high-traffic zones, is finished in epoxy resin. Rama Estudio colored that epoxy a saturated yellow, so the hard-wearing strip also works as wayfinding. You can read the circulation diagram straight off the floor: the yellow marks where people move, and the grey is where they stop and sit.

We like how literal this is. In a room that has to clear hundreds of trays an hour, the brief asked for efficient flows, and the answer is painted on the ground rather than buried in a plan. The gloss matters too. In a space with little daylight, the reflective resin bounces the ceiling fixtures and the glow of the kitchen counter back into the room, so the floor does some of the work a window would normally do.

The Deck: Bleachers for a Lunch Hour

The project takes its name from the stepped timber platform that climbs between the concrete columns. It is part bleacher and part study landing: students spread laptops across its treads, colleagues sit at long tables at its base, and it adds seats without adding the furniture clutter that a room this busy would otherwise accumulate.

The terrace also makes the room flexible over the course of a day. At noon it absorbs overflow from the dining floor. After work it becomes informal tiered seating for the after-office use that the brief called for. Plywood, supplied in part by Edimca, keeps the whole structure warm to the touch and cheap to repair, which is the right choice for a surface people will sit on, kick and drag bags across every day.

Leaving the Basement Visible

Above head height, Rama Estudio left the building almost untouched. Faceted metal ducts, fluorescent tubes, orange pipes and the ribs of the waffle slab are all in view. In an underground space, a dropped ceiling would have removed precious height and made the room feel even more buried. Leaving the soffit open makes the room taller and tells you honestly what kind of room you are in.

Tower #4 is the only LEED-certified tower in the complex, and that certification set requirements for the restaurant's building, energy and equipment. We read the exposed services partly in that light: equipment that has to meet performance standards is easier to inspect and maintain when it is not hidden. The black steel mesh wall with hanging bulbs uses the same restraint, adding a darker, more intimate corner to the room with little more than a backdrop and light.

Steel Planters Against Raw Concrete

With so little natural light, any planting here is a deliberate statement. Stacked black steel boxes, likely drawing on the NOVACERO steel credited to the project, hang on a raw concrete wall and carry spider plants and trailing vines. Black steel signage sits beside them, and a brick column nearby adds another raw texture.

The planters are modest, but they solve a real perception problem. A basement dining room can feel sealed off, and a few living things against the concrete soften that without pretending the space is anything other than what it is. The same wall also carries the restaurant's name, so it reads as the room's entrance, much as a storefront would at street level.

A Room for More Than Lunch

The brief identified the average user as a 35-year-old operations executive, but it also asked for a space that worked across ages and job levels. The result is a room deliberately pitched below corporate formality. A yellow ping-pong table sits among the dining tables. Chalkboard menus and drawings cover a yellow wall. High tables and stools lead toward the serving counter for people who want a quick bite rather than a seated meal.

The furniture strategy is consistent throughout: plywood tables, plywood chairs with cut-out backs, and epoxy surfaces wherever plates land, because the bar tables and dish areas needed to be easy to clean and disinfect. It is a durable kit of parts, not a collection of statement pieces, and it lets the yellow floor and the terrace carry the room's character.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings show how methodically the room was built up. The axonometric sequence starts with vehicle and pedestrian access, including entrances from the parking level and the main street. It then zones the shell, places the tiered platform with its seat counts, scatters the loose furniture, and finally fixes the kitchen, bar, pizzeria counter and restrooms along the edges.

The floor plan confirms what the photographs suggest: the yellow zones are circulation, not decoration. The service functions line the perimeter, and the center of the room stays open for seating and movement. For a 290 m² space handling hundreds of covers a day, that clarity is the whole project.

Why This Project Matters

DECK is a useful reminder that a tight brief can produce strong design if the architects let the constraints shape the space. A basement, a LEED rulebook, a cleaning regime and a daily headcount of up to 600 are not glamorous starting points. Rama Estudio treated each one as a design input: epoxy for hygiene became a wayfinding system, a seating requirement became a social terrace, and the lack of ceiling height became an argument for leaving the structure exposed.

It also shows a better model for the workplace canteen. Instead of an anonymous food court tucked under a tower, Quito's office workers and nearby students get a room with a clear identity, built from inexpensive materials and organized around how people actually move and gather. For any studio facing a dark commercial unit and a modest budget, the lesson is simple: decide what the floor needs to do, and let one bold move carry the rest.

DECK Restaurant by Rama Estudio (design team: Carla Chávez, Felipe Donoso, Carolina Rodas). Location: Ekopark Tower #4, Quito, Ecuador. Area: 290 m². Year: 2018. Client: Grupo del Hierro. Photography: Dany Herrera, Alejandra Rea, JAG estudio.

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