Workstead’s Buildings & Interiors team defines its work through a consistent set of values: among them an insistence on one-of-a-kind solutions, a commitment to distilling aesthetics to their essence, and an understanding of design as a framework for social belonging. These principles shape specific concepts, and from those concepts a space ultimately emerges. 

Those ideas underpinning a project’s design decision are typically established through an exchange of images, material samples, or even a meal through which Workstead learns about a client’s own values and desires. For the Atlanta outpost of Casi Cielo that opened last month, restaurateur Juan Fernando Henao proposed sharing the Oaxacan restaurant’s perspective through just such a dinner. And by the close of that evening in August 2023, the meal’s pressed tortillas—shaped by hand, held with affection, and revealed through presentation—became a reference for the design process moving forward. 

“Shaped by hand” is a precise phrase that the Buildings & Interiors team embraced for translating the care and craftsmanship of Casi Cielo’s food and hospitality into the design of the space. The team also chose “celebratory” and “pressed” as lodestars—the terms that would guide layout, problem solving, details, and even furniture selections—it would return to over and again. At the same time, the team responded to the project’s setting within a ground-floor interior of an Olson Kundig–designed building along Atlanta’s BeltLine. A great design would require Workstead to communicate Casi Cielo’s identity while taking the new building’s industrial character and the Beltline’s dynamism into consideration.

The Buildings & Interiors team began with a commitment to the architecture itself. Instead of concealing the unembellished structure and systems, Workstead preserved this baseline and nested the restaurant program into the wedge-shaped interior. Comprising banquettes, partitions, and millwork, as well as a monumental fiberglass chandelier, these “crafted insertions” feature touchable curved forms and warm materiality to contrast with Olson Kundig’s shell. They also reveal their assembly. Wood and fiberglass are left in partially raw states to retain evidence of their making, for example, and walls were finished in layers of plaster whose visible trowel marks evoke not only rammed earth but also the hand pressing of tortillas. These details mirror the care toward ingredients, making, and storytelling that Workstead observed at that first dinner. 

Spatially, the design team organized Casi Cielo to produce multiple social and more intimate experiences within 5,800 square feet. Seating is particularly varied for group occasions, ranging from recessed niches and planter-lined banquettes to the central bar anchored beneath the chandelier. Circulation occurs between zones, without rigid separation. 

Such fluidity extends to the restaurant’s indoor-outdoor relationships. Large operable doors link the interior to an adjacent 3,800-square-foot terrace for which Workstead created a freestanding pavilion, establishing the outdoor room as a threshold between the Fourth Ward and the beloved pedestrian corridor. The Buildings & Interiors team also aligned the new interior’s central bar and its custom, banquette-edged planter with the existing operable doors, treating the dining room, terrace, and public realm as parts of a whole. With doors open and curtains drawn, the energy of the exterior becomes part of the restaurantgoing experience, while the view from the bar to the Beltline is cohesive. Each position within this totality offers a distinct relationship to light, material, and activity, ensuring that no two visits unfold in quite the same way.

Light plays a defining role in this exchange. Within the interior, custom fixtures emit a warm, ambient glow that softens the concrete shell. At the center of the room, the chandelier gathers multiple pressed fiberglass pieces into a reverse-tapering mass that underlines the bar as a singular destination. In a similar vein, the terrace pavilion illuminates at night, signaling activity and drawing passersby toward Casi Cielo. 

Ultimately, Casi Cielo gives form to the foundational concepts established at the project’s outset, demonstrating how an experience can be distilled into a framework and carried through to the built interior with precision. What emerges is not a replication, but a translation from gesture to material, from crafted food and caring service to immersive physical environment. In this way, the restaurant extends Casi Cielo’s identity while responding to unique context. It does the same for our set of values. Casi Cielo shows how, through close collaboration, Workstead’s broad, yet clear principles generate spaces that resonate with a specific client and its public.