Por Frank Sabatini Jr.

Veiled behind the whiz-bang chefs who often steal the show in some of San Diego’s latest and greatest restaurants is the inconspicuous signature of Paul Basile, whose ego should be larger than the massive, swiveling entranceway he designed for the Big Front Door gourmet deli on Park Boulevard.

Remarkably, it isn’t.

Unpretentious and fiercely artistic, Basile possesses a hefty portfolio of clients who have commissioned him to transform the plainest of spaces into one-of-a-kind motifs that serve as the stunning faces to other Uptown hotspots such as Bankers Hill Bar + Restaurant, Ironside Fish & Oyster, Polite Provisions, Soda & Swine, Underbelly, and most recently, Underbelly II in North Park.

Through it all, he’s garnered five Orchid Awards and a Grand Orchid from the San Diego Architectural Foundation. The latter was received for his plush den-like design of Craft & Commerce.

Basile, a Detroit transplant and former construction worker, began his career making furniture and selling it from a gallery in the Gaslamp District. His workplace, Basile Studio, is located in the East Village and employs 32 workers who assist in building every design element from scratch.

Basile defines his style as “warm industrial” and with a penchant for recreating the labor-intensive craftsman feel of the 1920s and ’30s.

“Modern tools allow us to achieve that look,” he says, referring in part to the arduous detailing and tile work that went into fabricating Polite Provisions’ bygone soda-fountain élan, which earned him an Orchid this year.

“We were working with a really old building that was completely dilapidated. Nothing was square or level,” he says.

Hired by Consortium Holdings, which also owns Craft & Commerce, Ironside and Underbelly to name a few, the company gave Basile further license to unleash his magic on neighboring Soda & Swine as well.

With its original roof in disrepair, Basile removed it completely but kept the original beams and then left it at that. The result is an open-air dining space resembling a kicked-out farmhouse, though rigged with a discrete swimming pool tarp that is deployed when it rains.

“We knew it was going to be a meatball place, so we built a fireplace that looks like an old kiln in the woods,” he says.

In an age when reclaimed wood has become the trendy standard in restaurant design, Basile defends his use of the material and was perhaps one of the first local designers to begin flaunting it.

“We started doing this seven years ago, such as with Bankers Hill Bar + Restaurant, where we pulled boards from the ceiling, split them in half and used them on the walls. We were really ‘reclaiming.’”

That project, too, fetched him an Orchid.

“But steel and glass is what we utilize the most,” he adds. “Wood is an accent.”

Such is the case at nearby Azuki Sushi, for which Basile complemented its existing wood features with an entry system made of stainless steel and glass. For added artistic flair, he filled in the center of the door with azuki beans.

In transforming an old warehouse in Little Italy into Ironside, which features the markings of an old train depot, he also created flip-out doors containing 200 individual panes of glass, constructed all of the furniture and designed double-swivel bar stools. At 5,500 square feet, he says it was his biggest and most expensive project to date.

Basile, however, seems to have upped his game with Underbelly II, which opened recently on the ground level of the retail-residential North Parker building.

Boasting a 1,000-square-foot patio that seamlessly blends into the structure’s big-windowed façade, the ramen-centric restaurant had Basile mathematically piecing together more than 500 individual pieces of cut plywood that he tacked onto the walls. Incorporated into the scheme is a LED light system spanning from floor to ceiling.

“It was quite a feat,” he says.

Brass was used for the outdoor order counter while “live edge” blue pine adds a sleek finish to the yakatori bar top. In addition, the flames from his fire features flutter in synchrony to music from an integrated sound system.

When asked if he expects an Orchid in 2015 for the project, or for Ironside, Basile turns modest. “I never expect the awards, but it would be wonderful.”

With projects always in the pipeline, such as designing a second location of Soda & Swine in Liberty Station (due to open in March), the tireless designer, sculptor and fabricator says he works non-stop.

“I love what I do. I’m super blessed.”

Surprisingly, he doesn’t design any furnishings for his Downtown home.

“I buy from other designers,” Basile said. “I’m around myself all day long so I like to go home to somebody else’s work.”

—Contact Frank Sabatini Jr. at [email protected].