House of Dré Unveils Design for Tom’s Pasta in the Heart of Hackney, London
House of Dré is proud to unveil the interiors for Tom’s Pasta in Hackney, London. The celebrated neighbourhood restaurant has undergone a complete transformation including doubling the size of the original space with a generous new dining room, bar, kitchen and outside area.
Approachable, playful and unpretentious, House of Dré has created an interior that feels both contemporary and timeless.
Andreas Christodoulou, Founder & Creative Director, House of Dré
House of Dré is an award winning multidisciplinary design studio established in 2020 by Founder & Creative Director, Andreas Christodoulou. The studio’s work spans interior design, sculpture, furniture and industrial design.
House of Dré’s brief for the project was to create an authentically East London neighbourhood restaurant that reflected Tom’s welcoming nature, that could cater to larger bookings and gave further space for the kitchen.
Andreas Christodoulou, Founder & Creative Director of House of Dré and Tom Haydon, Founder of Tom’s Pasta are long standing friends, having met at Hackney Downs Studios – a creative hub and community space in East London located in a historic former printworks.
East London’s dining culture has always been shaped by the waves of people who arrived, worked, settled and cooked their way into the city’s identity. Many Italian families built their lives around Clerkenwell, Shoreditch and Bethnal Green, opening cafés, bakeries, gelaterie and early trattorias.
Long before espresso became part of London’s daily rhythm, these family run cafés were already serving it with a familiar sense of ease and welcome. By the mid century, Italian delis, cafés and social clubs had become part of the neighbourhood fabric, acting as social anchors as much as places to eat.
That legacy still sits at the heart of today’s East London dining scene. The same Italian values persist: neighbourhood warmth, independent spirit, unfussy generosity and an honest lived in edge you cannot really find anywhere else.
Tom’s Pasta has naturally become part of that story. It is now affectionately referenced by East London parody pages as the place everyone goes for their second date, a sign that it has been absorbed into the social rituals of this part of the city. Being in on that joke is almost part of living here.
Tom, of Tom’s Pasta says:
“East London has always been about community, and Italians understand that instinctively. Good food, open tables, generous spirit. That’s why a bowl of pasta feels so at home here.”
Tom’s Pasta sits on the edge of Hackney Downs Studios and is renowned amongst the thriving community of creatives such as artists, designers and filmmakers who work in the space.
Andreas Christodoulou comments:
“The new restaurant is not only exciting for East London, but also for the local community who already call Tom’s Pasta, ‘home’. Tom’s story has become part of the area’s folklore. From cooking and delivering his signature beef shin lasagne out of his mum’s shed during lockdown, to becoming a Hackney hero with a thriving neighbourhood restaurant.
The design challenge was to create a family restaurant that elevates Tom’s Pasta while preserving its approachable, down to earth charm and Italian inspired menu.”
When approaching the design, House of Dré took inspiration from traditional East London restaurants of decades past. Instead of looking back to Italy itself, House of Dré paid tribute to the spaces designed by Italian migrants who shaped East London’s dining culture and continue to feed the city today.
The bar sits within the heart of the new dining room, designed as both a working kitchen counter and a communal point of contact for guests. Its stainless steel front is softened with playful fringe detailing which adds a glamorous edge to the modernist Italian styling. The walnut finished timber gives warmth and echoes classic London trattoria’s.
The restaurant’s layout balances convivial long bespoke banquettes with flexible loose seating. The dining tables have been designed especially for the project and match the precise palette and material language of the space. All loose furniture was reclaimed, minimising waste and extending the life of well crafted vintage pieces.
The lighting is deliberately simple yet atmospheric. Bespoke scalloped wall lights gently illuminate artwork by local artists. Overhead, practical fixtures ensure the open kitchen and bar have the bright light required for working, while the dining area has been kept soft. Each table features a small table lamp creating an intimate dining experience.
The colour palette draws directly from the menu: tiramisu cream and the buttery yellow of handmade pasta. The tones of the space create an inviting warmth and break down the high ceiling, framing the artwork beautifully. Crisp contemporary edges are seen through stainless steel and chrome elements.
The walls within the space are a platform for local artists, with works created within 50 metres of the restaurant at Hackney Downs Studios. The artwork is on sale with all profits from the sales going directly to the artists. The programme will rotate, showcasing young and emerging East London talent.
Andreas Christodoulou comments:
‘This project is about collaboration and has community at its core. A local restaurateur, a local designer, and a space that celebrates local artists. It is not about luxury – it is about creating something playful, familiar and deeply reflective of this part of London.’
The restaurant also celebrates its creative community, showcasing work from artists based within just a few steps of the space at Hackney Downs Studios.
Coline L’Achiver
Coline L’Achiver is a visual designer and multimedia artist with an interest in semiotics and contemporary mythologies, surrealism, and abstract expressionism. She experiments through digital art, textile design, and printmaking. This piece is a three-layer screen-printed abstract landscape, inspired by a recent trip to the Arctic, and is part of the research process for a collaboration with local slow-fashion label Blue Nude.
Adrian Bliss
Adrian Bliss is a creator, writer, and performer from London best known for his comedy sketches which explore everything from history to natural science to religion. Bliss’s work has earned him nearly twenty million followers across social media and has been featured on CNN, in The Times, and in Vogue.
Name of piece: They’ve Been Swimming. Adrian creates studies of slow, nonchalant lives, suspended in dappled Mediterranean light. He describes himself as an artist who has been fooled into thinking everything is urgent.
Lulu Wentworth
Lulu is a London-based multidisciplinary artist whose work merges mysticism and symbolism. A Central Saint Martins graduate, she spent over two decades as a stylist and fashion editor before retraining as a hypnotherapist before returning to art with a renewed focus.
Her work is multidisciplinary focusing on the dark, the devil and the shadows – the places rarely associated with beauty. But without darkness, there is no light. Drawn to the hidden and the shamed parts of ourselves/herself, her work reveals the unexpected beauty and power that live within them.
Arden Rose
Arden Rose is a content creator and artist who immigrated from America to the UK in 2024. Her first exhibition premiered this year at Hackney Downs Studios.
The piece Southern Baptist was inspired by the churches I grew up around in Arkansas. During my childhood, mega churches with big auditoriums and pop star microphones became all the rage, but these singular buildings left to decay in the middle of the woods became symbols of what religion used to mean in the South. A small, local parish where everyone knew everyone’s business. A personal touch that gave way to Big Religion and people being paid a full salary to pass the tithing basket around. Nothing is really “old” in America as it’s such a new country, but churches like the one depicted in Southern Baptist are one of the oldest relics of simpler times and more intimate religion meant to enrich the souls of the congregation, not the pockets of the televangelists my grandparents watched on tv.
Tim Green
Tim Green is a multi-disciplinary artist and designer based in East London, UK. He holds a First Class Honours BA in Design & Art Direction from Manchester Metropolitan University.
Green’s practice spans a broad range of mediums, including oil paintings, books, silkscreen prints, watercolour, and mixed-media. His work explores the concept of micro-chaos forming a coherent macro aesthetic, drawing inspiration from the complex, organic patterns found in nature. Heavily influenced by the spontaneity and material freedom of the CoBrA and Fluxus art movements, his compositions often feature a dynamic contrast between naive mark-making and considered design.
My latest work is inspired by the macro-and-microscopic in our natural environment and the connection of who we are as humans, as animals, as collections of atoms. The part we play, socially and ecologically, as individuals who are intrinsically linked to wider systems. We are we, messy and whole and a multitude. We’re made of the same atoms as our surroundings, we are literally Earth animated. The title of this piece comes from a John Scalzi story describing how the “self” that we identify as sits within a scale of “selves” from our bacteria to wider society.