page_title: Pat Kuleto
section_title: Design style
hierarchical_section_title: Pat Kuleto / Projects / Design style
caption_attribution_description: Sustenance before climbing the stairs on Telegraph Hill! Interior of bar in San Francisco.
context_page_description: Pat Kuleto is an American designer, restaurant impresario, builder, innkeeper, and winemaker, credited with being the first American to bring recognition to restaurant design as a distinct form of interior design. Based in the San Francisco Bay Area, Kuleto had designed nearly 400 restaurants as of late 2009, including some of the most popular fine dining restaurants in the United States.
context_section_description: Kuleto's work does not fit a specific school of design, and is often described as being heavily themed and unique to him.  His projects are known for "whimsical" features, and use of expensive, hand-crafted ornamental materials.  He says he finds inspiration in many real-life objects, situations, books, places, and landscapes.  Most feature multiple dining rooms, a large bar that Kuleto describes as an "altar" that "legitimizes the drinking experience", and an "exhibition kitchen" so that diners can watch their food being cooked.
  Kuleto's design process is often extemporaneous, rather than fully planned at the beginning of a project.  He usually creates a fictional story about each location, imagining an old invented history.  As an example, Epic Roasthouse is imagined as (and is close to the real-life location of) a pump house that was proposed but never built as a backup fire protection system in San Francisco, and would likely have prevented most of the destruction from the fires caused by the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, which ruptured most of the cities primary water mains.  The restaurant is the pump house that would have saved the city.
caption: Fog City Diner in San Francisco, California
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