You enter Bánh Bánh through a corridor, the light is low, coaxing you forward until a pink-tiled shrine appears, dressed with fruit and incense. It’s only once you pass it that the room opens into a bar wrapped in curved glass block, with cool concrete and warm timber panelling throughout – and if you look closely, you’ll spot a almost one hundred hand-painted still lifes worked into the wood. Overhead in the private dining room, four painted beasts stand guard; a ceramic mountain sits on a plinth in one corner of the room; and on the fresco behind it, the same mountain reappears in metal leaf, sand and powdered shell.
When the food arrives, there’s a mẹt platter of rice reimagined three ways, including soft steamed cakes, chewy tapioca dumplings and crisp-fried grains, all meant for dragging through nước chấm, that sharp tangle of fish sauce, garlic, chilli and lime. Grilled turmeric monkfish with dill is paired with lemongrass pork sausage rolled in sugarcane, tofu comes crisped with a chickpea coating lavished in scallion oil, and beef is wrapped in betel leaf with vermicelli. Drinks run from a sesame boulevardier and a cilantro margarita to, for the soft-drink list, a tamarind fizz built from tamarind pulp, pineapple, ginger and soda.
The space was reimagined this year by artist duo Joseph Losper and Tomio Shota, working under the name House of Baby, with a new menu from Hanoi-born artist AP Nguyen. It's the trio's second project together after Peckham’s Lai Rai, which earned a Michelin Bib Gourmand within six months of opening. Bánh Bánh has operated on Coldharbour Lane for years, and this new version strips out its old identity, dropping the phở-house staples in favour of the sharing-plate format Vietnamese families use at home. It forms part of a wider Bánh Bánh story that began in 2016, when Kevin Nguyen and his siblings first opened in Peckham before expanding across London.
House of Baby didn’t start out designing restaurants, though the studio describes itself simply as an artistic collaboration between Losper and Shota, working with painting, food and performance as material. Losper trained in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Arts, before spending a decade in hospitality including a stretch as general manager and later marketing and communications manager at BAO London. That grounding left him fixated on the idea of “Restaurants as Theatre”, the “kind of play that happens inside the space, every day, the rehearsed performance carried out by the staff and guests”, he says. Shota's route came from Japanese painting, theatre-making, Fine Art and Hospitality, followed by an MA at Tokyo University of the Arts and two solo exhibitions in Japan in 2018. House of Baby's approach to spatial design now draws openly on directing theatre or film, treating the people who move through a room as characters within a living composition instead of passive diners.
The studio itself began, unexpectedly, with carpets. “We began in 2022 originally with a carpet-based practice, exploring creating worlds with new boundaries. Over the years, our exploration of the abstract concept of ‘Carpet’ led us to reconsider our understanding of spatial bounds, which led us to creating entire spaces as the most natural expression of our work,” Losper explains. The name traces back to that same period, when the pair were less concerned with finished outcomes than with giving themselves room to test things out. “When we started conceptualising House of Baby, we thought a lot about the idea of a den or a lab, or a kind of private place where kids would learn and play and experiment,” Losper says. “We wanted House of Baby to embody that same feeling of exploration.”
That instinct for reinterpretation over replication, rather than simply borrowing an aesthetic, runs through everything the studio creates. “Some of the fundamental tenets underpinning our work are the ideas of translation, reinterpretation and reactivation of ideas or concepts, rather than simply transplanting them,” Losper says. “Investigating the distortion that comes from the repeated translation and reinterpretation of ideas is incredibly interesting for us. We seek collaborations and projects that offer us the opportunity to expand our research and reinterpret ideas through the House of Baby lens.”
Alongside Lai Rai and Bánh Bánh – which carried Losper onto Code’s 30 Under 30, Class of 2026, alongside AP Nguyen – House of Baby’s portfolio includes Pleasure Garden, Mr & Ms Soft, Who Stole the Sand & Sea?, Logica Picnic, TOWN Lounge and two editions of BAO & Friends at Dover Street Market. There’s more in the pipeline too, including projects across Carnaby, Covent Garden and Sharjah spanning hospitality, wellness and performance, alongside further spaces already in development under the House of Baby name.
Below, Losper and Shota talk through where their ideas come from, what it actually means to call a restaurant a “unified artwork”, the design decisions behind the new Bánh Bánh, how the menu and the room were built to speak to each other, and what they hope people take away from an evening at the table.
What inspires your work, are there any particular references or influences you’re drawn to?
Shota: The idea of travelling abroad, discovering something visually interesting, and simply reproducing or borrowing it has rarely felt particularly compelling to me. I am far more interested in understanding the underlying ideas, relationships, and cultural contexts that give something its meaning, and then reinterpreting them to create something entirely new.
I often find that inspiration doesn't arrive all at once. Instead, it accumulates quietly over many years, only revealing its meaning when seemingly unrelated experiences suddenly connect.
When I entered junior high school, the very first words my music teacher said to the class were: “Sensitivity can be cultivated, but it cannot be taught.” At the time, none of us really understood what he meant. We had only just left elementary school, and the classroom was filled with confusion.
Twelve years later, while studying for my MA in Nihonga (Japanese painting) at Tokyo University of the Arts, I attended a lecture in the architecture department. The professor spoke about how “human behaviour is shaped by space”. At that moment, the sentence I had heard as a child suddenly returned to me, and the two ideas became inseparable. Together they formed a new thought: “Human behaviour is shaped by space, and human sensibility is cultivated by the environments we inhabit.” Two years later, this became the central statement for one of my solo exhibitions.
Experiences like this have shaped the way I work. I don’t believe inspiration comes from a single artist, movement or reference. Instead, I think it exists everywhere – in conversations, lectures, places, memories and everyday life. If we remain attentive, ideas that seem insignificant today may one day reveal unexpected relationships with something entirely different.
This way of thinking also informs House of Baby. We are less interested in directly referencing existing aesthetics than in discovering hidden connections between painting and architecture, food and performance, objects and space, the micro and the macro. Through reinterpretation, we try to reveal relationships that were always present but had not yet been seen.
Ultimately, our work is an ongoing process of making invisible connections visible.
You describe each project as a “unified artwork” for people to experience. What does that mean in practice? At what point does a restaurant become an artwork?
Losper: This could very easily turn into a much bigger conversation, as it touches on the fundamental question of what art actually is. At risk of this answer reaching well over novel length, the short answer is that for us, something is recognised as art when it exists within a context that carries the questions and philosophical concerns of contemporary art. Our work is rooted in researching, interpreting and responding to the histories and contexts of art. Whatever emerges from that process, whether it’s a painting, a sculpture or a restaurant, is already an artwork because it has been conceived through our artistic practice.
The new Bánh Bánh restaurant feels beautifully considered, from the Vietnamese shrine and curved glass blocks to the painted screens and ceramic sculptures. Could you walk us through the design and explain some of the details, materials or moments, and why you chose them?
Losper: When conceptualising the space, we were taken by the concept of gradually discovering unexpected surprises, rather than revealing everything at once. We wanted to create a space that unfolds as you move through it. You’re first greeted by a long corridor with the pink-tiled shrine drawing you forwards. As you continue, the curved glass block wall slowly reveals itself, wrapped around the bar. Then, as you reach the back of the narrow building, the space suddenly opens onto the frescoes. We wanted the architecture itself to create a rhythm of anticipation and surprise.
Many of the details are designed to reward closer attention. From a distance, a timber-panelled wall appears almost uniform, but up close it reveals nearly one hundred hand-painted still life motifs. In the private dining room, paintings of the Four Beasts, the guardians of the cardinal directions, sit quietly overhead. A sculpture by artist AP Nguyen appears as a physical object in the restaurant, while the same mountain re-emerges within the frescoes. These moments are all in conversation with one another, encouraging people to notice relationships rather than isolated objects.
The building itself also informed the design. Its long, narrow plan naturally echoes the spatial organisation found in many urban Vietnamese buildings, with distinct front, middle and rear spaces. Rather than imposing a new layout, we worked with that rhythm and used it to choreograph the experience of moving through the restaurant.
More broadly, every material and artwork was chosen to contribute to a single unified piece. We weren’t interested in decorative gestures or individual focal points. Instead, we wanted the paintings, sculpture, ceramics, lighting, architecture and even the food to feel as though they belonged to the same world, each quietly reinforcing the others.
The space is drawn from Vietnamese modernism. Can you talk more about that influence? How do you balance cultural influences with creating something that feels new?
Shota: We have a longstanding interest in the schools of thought that developed throughout the twentieth century, such as Modernism, Postmodernism, Critical Regionalism, and Cultural Translation. Our practice is supported by continually engaging with and seeking to understand the ideas established by those who came before us.
In our work, we combine elements that make cultural backgrounds directly recognisable with others that have been abstracted or transformed, allowing them to be perceived more indirectly. Through this layering, we aim to create an experience that gradually influences the visitor’s perception, revealing different levels of cultural recognition over time.
Food is treated like another material in your work, alongside wood, plaster, paint and metal. How closely do the menu, service and spatial design evolve together, and how do you create a dialogue between what’s on the plate and what’s around it?
Shota: I enjoy playing with the relationship between the micro and the macro. A painting within a painting, or a play within a play, like in Kiss Me, Kate, where we can see Shakespeare's The Taming of the Shrew. So, for example, in the space on Coldharbour Lane, you can see almost other worlds through individual pieces within the unified space.
This is two-way, though. All these elements are always in dialogue – for example, you can see monkfish painted on one of the lamps and in the fresco painting, and you can see monkfish on one of the platters. The sculpture can be seen both on display in the second group dining space and also in the fresco. Herbs from the menu are also seen in the fresco and on the lamp, and even the performance we created as part of the launch celebrations was connected to the mirrored wall.
This exploration of micro and macro extends into the paintings as well: materials such as metal leaf, sand, iron oxide, and powdered shells are combined with motifs related to food culture, interpreting the entire space of the restaurant as a canvas.
How do you hope visitors experience the space at Bánh Bánh Brixton?
Shota: When the space first opened earlier this year, a guest said, “It feels like dining inside a beautiful painting.” Ultimately, we hope that, even if only for an hour or two, the restaurant feels like its own self-contained world. If people leave feeling they’ve experienced something they can’t quite compare to anywhere else, then we’ve succeeded. The greatest compliment isn’t that someone notices a particular material or painting, but that they joyfully remember the experience as a whole.
What’s next for you, and are there any other projects in the pipeline?
Shota: We're turning our attention to considering what a truly House of Baby space would be. What would it look like, what would it feel like to be there, what kind of people would be there with us? What does it mean for a pure House of Baby space to exist in the world? It’s all still very conceptual at the moment, but they’re incredibly exciting questions.