24th December 2000

Men's Folio

f o r m   by : Eddy Koh

Dec 2000 / Feb 2001

Raw and rural finishes, and colorful Mexican memorabilia everywhere. That's the way casual party animals like it at Café Iguana. Rough unfinished wood was used to build the liquor display shelving at Café Iguana that boasts the largest selection of tequila in the region. This rare shot shows the bar with an altar set up to commemorate the most important date on the Mexican calendar, the Day of the Dead, on October 31 to November 1 only.

Photos : Edward Hendricks and Alan Lee / CI & A Photography

nightlife mojo

Ed Poole's decade of bar, cafe and restaurant designs helped transform Singapore's clubbing and dining scene. Lately, he's in a samba loop

Ocho is a smoldering sophisticated Spanish Tapas bar with a sinuous tentacled 'octopussy' blue mosaic counter, palatial Moorish arches, a bolero-shaped black iron chandelier with sparkling Swarovski crystals, red velvet drapes and Antonio Gaudi's Guell-inspired crazy ceramic tiling.

Café Iguana cuts it fun, loose and brassy with fuchsia walls, lime green pillars, fire-engine red pulley-operated cross-hatched glass doors, rough unfinished plywood shelving and chunky wooden cantina tables. Ed calls it folkloric and fiesta.

Ed will claim a unique hat trick if and when the Cuban concept F&B outlet he hopes to design materializes. Cuba is another major Spanish-speaking country. Forty years of international isolation since Fidel Castro took power has stuck Cuba in a 1960's time warp with its architectural landscape totally intact and unchanged. After having spent a month traveling through the length and breadth of the communist state last January, Ed is brimming with ideas on how exciting the interior of the bar or restaurant can be.

Footnote January 2001 : Poole Associates has designed a massive 13,800 sq ft Cuban Restaurant and Bar for the Westin Hotel, KL. Opening early 2003. Tender drawings are being issued  January 2002.

A native of Chicago, Ed graduated from the Illinois Institute of Technology with a degree in architecture. He worked in Australia before landing in Singapore 10 years ago at the age of 30. His first F&B project was the debut Scoops Cafe here followed by 26 Haagen-Dazs outlets. Then there was the tryst with Maoist kitsch in the House of Mao and The Red Book in 1998. The bars he designed including (the revamped Brewerkz coming in 2001), Lava Lounge, Sugar, Hu'u, Front Page and Club Eden which plundered ideas from the groovy 1960's to Adam and Eve's garden were all smash hits, further consolidating his party innovator reputation. He also designed a grand total of five different bars and restaurants at Chijmes including China Jump and Bobby Rubino's.

Ed and Chijmes seem to have a special synergy. But it hasn't always been smooth for Ed. Not when he had a serious fall outside Chijmes in 1998 while waiting for a taxi. Ed tore all the ligaments in his left knee. He was laid up for months. And the doctor tells him that he still needs to implant healthy ligaments taken from his right knee that's grown in a petri dish if he wants his injured knee to be rebuilt to take on more active sports. That and a legal battle burnt him out. It made him decide to temporarily close Poole Associates in end 1999 for three months for a much needed break.

The Cuban trip he took during the break was also a personal test. He wanted to find out if he could walk eight hours a day without his left knee hurting. He made it not only to Havana but also as far as remote Matanzas where Elian Gonzales, the boy in the middle of the custody battle between his Cuban father and US relatives came from.

"I got by on my Spanish. In Matanzas, all the villagers came to see me when they heard I am from Singapore. They expected to see an Asian. I was even invited to dinner with the party chief there. I traveled everywhere by jeep, bus, train and 1945 Packards called collectivos (collective taxis). In the remote areas, guys in military uniforms will pass out queue numbers and flag down every vehicle with empty seats to give people a lift to a place where there's public transport. There is no American fast food and no advertising. The main staples are rice, black beans and a pizza bread with goat cheese and tomato paste sold in the streets, "Ed says of the country whose hearty happy people amaze him.

"When I finally get to design a Cuban restaurant or bar, I want it to be authentic," Ed declares. The first thing would be to get the name right because he feels that's the important starting point.

"Ocho is Spanish for eight. It's a lucky number in Chinese. It's the number of tentacles an octopus has. Octopus cooked in their own ink is a Spanish favorite. So the octopus is used as the logo. The bar is also shaped like an octopus. The tentacles curve in a way that allows people to even sit in groups of eight facing each other at the bar," Ed explains.

With his impressive portfolio of bars and restaurants, Ed receives almost daily enquiries from repeat clients and green-horned ones on possible new projects. He admits that sometimes he can even be talking to as many as four different parties who may all be pitching for the same available space. Despite the profusion of F&B outlets he has designed, he has consistently managed to create a distinctive identity for each concept.

Still, there are little telltale signature signs if you look closely. The most obvious is Ed's fascination with diamond-shaped quilted pouffs. You spy them on the back of the banquettes at The BlueGinger Peranakan restaurant and again at Ocho. You see them glittering flat on the wall at Sugar and again sprouting like a shiny silvery mushroom pillar at Lee Hwa Diamond Gallery at Citylink Mall.

My office has converted fully to using AutoCad and we are now able to explore even more complex possibilities like the centerpiece pillar at Lee Hwa. We used the computer to calculate the exact shapes and sizes of the 'diamonds' for the pillar, had them manufactured at a factory and installed them on site without a hitch," Ed says of his new faith in software systems.

"We have an associated office in Dusseldorf, Germany called Originate that's set up by an old college friend. They do web design. It's important for bars and restaurants to be on the web to take reservations and build the brand's image worldwide. Most of our clients here do not have the experience to get on the web. So we help them do it. The Café Iguana and Ocho web sites are designed in Germany and we administer them here at our office," Ed elaborates on the extra value Poole Associates offers.

Ed and his staff of six will be moving to their new penthouse office at the top of Pearl's Hill in Chinatown this December. They will be celebrating the company's 10th anniversary in 2001. And after six applications over the past decade, Ed has finally been granted permanent resident status in Singapore.