Brooklyn-based Surrane Design has completed the interior for Hommali, a new Thai restaurant tucked into the western fringe of New York’s West Village, shaping the space to echo both a rice paddy’s growing cycle and the layout of a traditional Thai home.
Hommali was opened by three Bangkok-born hospitality professionals who crossed paths after relocating to New York: chef Chattchakorn “Benz” Khajornchaisan, general manager Kritayanee “Air” Promsarin and operations lead Pichalak “Picha” Srigungvarl. Their venue holds an eight-seat bar and a separate 20-seat dining room, along with a semi-private mezzanine, a wine room, and a dry-age room where visitors can see ducks and other ferments on display.
Surrane Design, run by partners Bud Nitaya and Yoon Her, built the interior around materials meant to evoke domestic Thai architecture. A terracotta floor runs through the restaurant, while the main dining room sits beneath the mezzanine in a configuration the studio compares to an open-air courtyard at the center of a house.
A palette drawn from the rice harvest
The studio chose its colors, ranging through browns and greens, to trace the stages a rice plant moves through as it grows and is processed. As the team described it:
“The color palette is inspired by the stages of the rice plant: fresh green for young leaves, golden yellow for mature stalks, earthy brown for paddy soil, soft beige for rice husks, and warm cream white for polished rice.”
That theme continues at the entrance, where a light fixture shaped like a rice plant greets arriving guests before they reach the bar, which is finished in a sandy fluted tile and furnished with leather and velvet seating.
Personal touches and vernacular detail
Ahead of the main dining room, two booths are separated from the mezzanine level by curtains and open shelving. Those shelves hold keepsakes contributed by the ownership team, including vintage Thai cookbooks dating to the late 1960s and early 1970s and other pieces the designers say resemble the contents of a family living room. Small bamboo sculptures by Thai artist Korakot Aromdee appear throughout the restaurant, and additional artwork was sourced from Bangkok’s Chatuchak Weekend Market.
A wood-lined staircase connects the ground floor to the mezzanine, where seating is set behind a frosted glass railing beneath a large skylight positioned over a communal dining table. The upper level is finished with banquette seating and an off-white wallpaper embossed with three-dimensional plant motifs, and, like the floor below, it can be closed off with a curtain for added privacy.
The menu, developed by Benz, offers reinterpreted Thai dishes, among them a seafood cocktail built around razor clams and the sour, spicy character of tom yum, and a drink called the Tomato, described by the founders as a cross between a michelada and a spritz made with a Singaporean rice wine base and a Thai chile tincture.
Hommali is a reminder that an interior scheme reads best when it is organised around one idea rather than a set of finishes. Our guide to modern interior design covers how that principle plays out at domestic scale.
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