dining room with blue limewash walls, basketlike chandeliers and colorful sconces and chairs
For the main dining room at Il Totano restaurant in downtown Manhattan, Sasha Bikoff Interior Design channeled coastal Italy through 60-inch-wide basketlike rattan ceiling fixtures from Visual Comfort, Maharam’s sunset-toned felt banquette upholstery, and grotto-inspired wall paint in a custom limewash finish conceived with Little Greene.

October 8, 2024

Words: Annie Block 

Photography: Tory Williams

Dine At A Restaurant Reminiscent Of The Amalfi Coast

It was 2018 when Sasha Bikoff made a splash at her first ever Kips Bay Decorator Showhouse in New York, turning the staid spiral stairway into a vivid and memorable journey of chromatic pattern play. Since that, her residential practice took off—and, more recently, so has her commercial work, as witnessed in Il Totano, located a couple dozen blocks south of that fateful showhouse.

The 1,900-square-foot, 85-seat restaurant is an ode to all things southern Italian, from the seafood-focused cuisine (chef Harold Dieterle is of Sicilian heritage; il totano means flying squid) to the décor, its luminous, saturated palette inspired by the “sunset-colored beach umbrellas, terra-cotta ceramics, and calypso-blue grottos,” Bikoff admires on her frequent visits to the Amalfi Coast. Among the highlights are the dining room’s massive rattan light fixtures reminiscent of fishing baskets, the restroom’s octopus-spangled wallpaper, and the bar’s lemon-yellow table lamps, fittingly sourced from Flos.

Savor This Restaurant Embracing Southern Italian Heritage

dining room with blue limewash walls, basketlike chandeliers and colorful sconces and chairs
For the main dining room at Il Totano restaurant in downtown Manhattan, Sasha Bikoff Interior Design channeled coastal Italy through 60-inch-wide basketlike rattan ceiling fixtures from Visual Comfort, Maharam’s sunset-toned felt banquette upholstery, and grotto-inspired wall paint in a custom limewash finish conceived with Little Greene.
bar with yellow chairs and dining area with blue striped wallpaper
The bar’s Marcel Breuer Cesca stools and chairs, Bellhop table lamps by Edward Barber and Jay Osgerby, and custom sconces in alabaster-esque resin.
dining area with blue striped wallpaper and yellow lamps on table
This dining area is reminiscent of sunset-colored beach umbrellas that are seen on the Amalfi Coast.
branding and custom dishware for the Il Totano
All branding and custom dishware also by Bikoff.
restroom with octopus wallpaper, curved red mirror and yellow tile
A restroom’s Etsy-sourced mirror and Octopussy wallpaper from Voutsa.

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