Rama Estudio Turns the Base of an Ecuadorian Office Tower into a Plywood and Yellow Resin Restaurant

Corporate parks rarely give restaurants much to work with. The usual inheritance is a leftover slab at the foot of an office block, a ceiling crowded with services, and a clientele that arrives in waves at lunch and disappears by evening. DECK, completed in 2018 by the Ecuadorian practice Rama Estudio, occupies exactly this kind of space in Tower 4 of the Ekopark corporate center. At 290 m², it is a modest commission, and the studio has treated it as one.

What makes the project worth your attention is how little it hides. The waffle slab, the concrete columns, the orange pipes and the faceted ductwork all stay in view. Rama Estudio adds only three things to that raw shell: a strip of glossy yellow floor, a stepped plywood seating platform, and a family of plywood furniture. That restraint is the design. The architects let a few strong moves organise a space they could not reshape, and the result reads as a deliberate place rather than a tenant fit-out.

A Yellow Floor That Does the Wayfinding

The most legible gesture is the glossy yellow resin floor. It runs as a band between the plywood tables and leads the eye straight to the open kitchen counter. Where it meets the polished concrete, the change in finish marks the circulation spine without a single partition or sign. In a deep floor plate with limited daylight, a reflective surface also bounces whatever light arrives back into the room.

We like that the colour is doing a job instead of decorating. Yellow sets the path, the counter sets the destination, and the furniture stays on the matte grey edges. It is a cheap, durable intervention, and it shows how far a single floor finish can go in a space where the ceiling is off limits.

Stepped Seating as Built Landscape

The tiered plywood platform is the project's centrepiece. It rises between the concrete columns like a set of bleachers and gives the room a topography it otherwise lacks. The photographs show students and workers spread across its levels with laptops. That tells you the brief reached beyond lunch service: this is a room built to be occupied for hours.

The platform also solves a seating problem that loose furniture cannot. Each step is a bench, a table and a ledge at once, so it absorbs a crowd at peak hours and still reads as a lounge when the room is half empty. Placing it under the lowest band of services lets the people on it sit close to the exposed pipes, which makes the ceiling feel less like an afterthought.

Plywood Furniture with a Working Logic

The loose furniture repeats the material of the platform. The chairs pair plywood frames with dark backrests and cut-out handholds, a small detail that makes them easy to drag between tables. Tall stools line up toward the lit kitchen counter, and chalkboard menus and drawings on the yellow wall keep the graphics informal and easy to change.

A yellow ping-pong table shows what kind of program this is. In an office complex, the restaurant doubles as the break room nobody else provides. Rama Estudio designs for that use openly, and the materials are sturdy enough to take the wear.

Leaving the Services in Plain Sight

Look up anywhere in DECK and you see the building working: the waffle slab, the faceted metal ducts, the sloping concrete underside of the structure above. The studio does not drop a ceiling or paint everything black. The infrastructure stays raw and becomes part of the room.

The long views down the dining hall show why this matters. With the ceiling left at full height, the space keeps its depth and volume, and the services set a rhythm that the rows of tables follow. The black benches with timber legs, placed against a mesh-backed platform, show the studio carrying that blunt, industrial palette into the smaller corners of the plan.

Planting Against Bare Concrete

The softest element sits on the hardest surface. A bare concrete wall carries oversized cut-out letters and rows of black steel planters filled with spider plants and trailing leaves. The planters give a long wall rhythm and depth, and they put living material beside the plywood and resin.

It is a small gesture, and the project does not oversell it. Still, the planters show the same thinking as the rest of DECK: a repeated, modular steel element fixed to the existing shell, with no attempt to disguise the concrete behind it.

Plans and Drawings

The drawings make the strategy clear. The floor plan highlights the entry and the tiered seating in yellow and arranges the bar, lounge, kitchen and restrooms around them. The axonometric series follows a clear sequence: access, zoning, the seating platform lifted out of the floor plate, the loose furniture, the entrances and the program spaces.

Two diagrams stand out. The first maps pedestrian approaches from both the parking and the street, which shows how hard the restaurant has to work to draw people in from a tower base. The second shows sunlight reaching the deck, a reminder that in a ground-level space beneath an office block, daylight is a resource you plan for.

Why This Project Matters

Most hospitality interiors in corporate settings fight their host building. They hang false ceilings, add finishes and try to make the shell disappear. DECK takes the opposite route. Rama Estudio accepts the concrete, the ducts and the columns, then puts its small budget of design into the floor, the seating and the furniture. Those are the surfaces people actually touch.

The lesson carries well beyond Ecuador. A restaurant at the foot of an office tower can serve as a café, a workspace, a lounge and a games room if its fixed elements are generous and its loose ones are tough. DECK shows that a strip of yellow resin and a set of plywood steps can give a leftover space its own identity.

DECK Restaurant by Rama Estudio. Location: Tower 4, Ekopark corporate center, Ecuador. Area: 290 m². Year: 2018. Photography: Dany Herrera, Alejandra Rea and JAG estudio.

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