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Savor Nature in the Tropical Vibes of Makau Kitchen & Bar Designed by 23 Degrees Design Shift
- Style Essentials Edit Team
- Dec 11, 2025
- 3 min read
Tucked into the dense urban fabric of Jubilee Hills, Makau Kitchen & Bar unfolds like a hidden retreat—an 18,516 sq. ft. sanctuary that seems to breathe differently from the city around it. Designed by 23 Degrees Design Shift for Adithya Thanoj and Raja Simha Reddy, the space reimagines what an indoor–outdoor restaurant can feel like when landlocked by towering office blocks on two sides and the massive presence of a metro station rising behind it. With its only true entry tucked into an inner lane, Makau could easily have felt enclosed. Instead, it opens up.
The designers turned Hyderabad’s warm, generous climate into their greatest ally. Rather than compensating for the site’s constraints, they embraced them, shaping a space where nature becomes an active participant. The usual markers of the outdoors—light, air, greenery—were easy companions. The challenge was crafting a sense of views where none naturally existed. Makau answers this by folding the outdoors inward, letting the interior act as a landscape of its own. The restaurant becomes a world within itself, a layered ecosystem of materials, textures, and light.
Polycarbonate sheets soften the harshness of the sun, filtering daylight in a way that feels organic rather than engineered. Perforated baskets overhead scatter shadows like foliage would, creating a subtle dappling effect. Air, too, is treated with unusual sensitivity. Because conditioned air isn’t ideal for thriving plants, the design returns to an almost-forgotten technology: coolers. Ducts channel their moisture-rich breeze, while open bricks make sure the air keeps moving. These bricks do more than ventilate; they anchor the atmosphere, giving the space a semi-open rhythm that feels undeniably tropical.
The brief asked for a nightclub as well, and that requirement unfolds in the most unexpected way—through a giant oval carved into the plan. It sits like a separate organism, a self-contained volume that shifts the perception of scale and energy. It provides a dramatic counterform to the openness around it, a deliberate pause in the spatial narrative, a place where sound, movement, and light can gather and intensify without disturbing the calm that defines the rest of Makau.
Materials throughout amplify this mood of cultivated wildness. Metal columns and beams merge with concrete slabs in a composite structure that feels robust yet quiet. Customized concrete blocks shape the space with subtle variation, while a pigmented concrete floor ties everything together in earthy cohesiveness. Wooden log furniture—sourced from Bali—adds warmth, tactility, and the raw, grounded beauty of natural timber. Every piece feels like part of a larger story, a tropical vocabulary translated into an urban accent.
Makau is assembled the way a bird might build a nest: thoughtfully, instinctively, from fragments that might not seem connected at first glance but come together in surprising harmony. What emerges is not simply a restaurant, but a kind of escape—lush, textural, and gently removed from the pressures of the city just outside its walls. It is a tropical getaway shaped from concrete and metal, yes, but also from light, air, memory, and imagination. A place that invites you to settle in and stay.
Fact File:
Project Name: Makau
Location: Jubilee Hills, Hyderabad
Architecture: 23 Degrees Design Shift
Photography: Rithika Jain
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