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RADAR
FEATURES
COMMENT
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| | RADARDELIGHT Sam Aukland celebrates the idiosyncratic pleasures of Adelaide’s Elephant Walk Cafe.
Photos Steve Rendoulis.
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It’s like walking into a different time,
the place is so unfamiliar. Yet familiar,
when you look close. The Elephant Walk
Cafe, on Adelaide’s Melbourne Street, hits
you like a brick and grows on you like a
rash. It’s amazing.
I’ve been going there for about ten years
now, because it has all the characteristics
that your living room might have; if you
slept in your living room. It’s warm. The
place looks warm and it feels warm. It’s
comfortable and it’s very interesting.
The Elephant Walk is themed. Everyone
says it smacks of India. But it’s decorated
with tacky and beautiful souvenirs and
trophies from Thailand, Indonesia, Africa
and someone’s lounge room. And the lights
are so low, with their red filters of
cellophane, you couldn’t care less. You
“feel” the Elephant Walk. And somehow it renders all your senses equal.
The guy that dreamed it all up, back in
1987, had a flare for the esoteric. It’s
alleged that he took his ballroom dancing
partner on a junket around Asia and that’s
when he came up with the idea. He
brought some exquisite timber elephants
home. The next owner, Ian Zibell, ran it for
about eleven years and opened the palm
garden out the back. The current owners,
Mark and Belinda, have resisted changing
the place too much. For the palm garden,
they designed a table and had a friend
make it out of old jarrah sleepers. Mark’s
very proud of it and he wanted it
photographed. I could see where he was
coming from.
The idea of creating something useful and
alluring out of the fundamentally useless
and mundane has its certain charm. This principle bore the Elephant Walk.
The origin of the name isn’t cut and
dried. There’s an Elephant Walk Cafe in
Paris. And there’s the movie. But I think it’s
named for mysteriousness and captivation,
just like Siam itself, and that’s it. The
name’s just a motif. An excuse to cram
pack elephant statues throughout the place.
That, and it rolls off the tongue too. “Let’s
go to the Elephant Walk,” you say after a
meal at the tastiest of restaurants. Because
it’s worth leaving wherever you are, just to
sink into the soft couches and light.
It’s funny, but people laugh when they
first come in. You know it’s a cafe, but it
could be a bar or a bordello. And the range
of people who come to laugh and lounge
is wide. With lazy eyes, they lay back and
listen. Mark, a musician himself, plays the
stuff that people don’t often hear, like U2 song producer Daniel Lanois. The music
floods every booth and every booth is the
universe. The place is absolutely custom
made for couples.
But why talk about a small, bohemian
cafe of questionable architectural merit
in Architecture Australia? Wondrous coffee
and humble food helps, but the Elephant
Walk is about ambience. The atmosphere
there is as strong as Epsom Salts. It’s a
space that was imagined and created out
of nothing. It’s a cafe that proves that you
don’t need big money to set something up.
To a background of soft Ladysmith Black
Membaso I speak to Mark of the obvious
eclecticism. “Yes it’s eclectic, but within
the framework,” he says. Whatever that
framework is, it “feels” good.
Sam Aukland is an architect in private
practice in Adelaide.
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Copyright © 2010 Architecture Media Pty Ltd
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