The UK’s First Zero-Waste Restaurant Silo Boasts a Raw and Minimalist Interior Aesthetic

Generating like nature, This newly designed restaurant provides a quality food system and presents a comfortable interior.

Chef and visionaire Douglas McMaster has set out to change the way eateries source, cook and sell their food through his newly opened restaurant Silo. Located in Brighton, it prides itself of being UK’s first zero-waste restaurant and serves seasonal, local, vegetarian food, filters water through osmosis, grinds wheat for making bread, and composts all organic waste. Baines & Fricker adds to Silo's reputation as an ethical eatery by adorning the minimalist interior entirely with vintage furniture and recycled materials.

Brighton’s restaurant-bakery-coffee house Silo was meticulously planned with sustainability in mind. It prides itself on having a pre-industrial food system that generates zero waste, has no bin, is chemical-free, and the toilets flush with wastewater from the coffee machine. The restaurant serves mostly vegan and vegetarian food made from local ingredients, trades directly with farmers, mills flour, makes yoghurt, grows its own mushrooms, and has a machine for composting organic matter.

Local husband and wife team Baines & Fricker were in charge of the interiors and followed McMaster’s wish for a pure, raw, and ‘undone’ design. Thanks to a local non-profit community project that ‘use[s] and share[s] unwanted goods,’ Silo’s open-plan space was furnished with salvaged objects. This includes school tables topped with galvanized flooring tiles as well as plenty of modular sterling board (OSB) chairs and stools.

Naturally designed with a closed loop philosophy in mind, Silo generates no waste at all, just like nature.