Tag Archives: cafe

The Harudot Cafe Features A Curving Form With A Baobab Tree Growing Through It

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Dubbed the Harudot Cafe, this unique-looking structure in the beachside town of Chonburi, Thailand is designed by local studio IDIN Architects. The building is highlighted by gabled forms clad in blackened wood which are curved, and subtly pulled apart, to form a “dynamic and memorable” space for the cafe brand Nana Coffee Roasters, and the owner of the property. The curving form of the cafe was inspired by the owner’s “particular interest in unique plants”.

Designer: IDIN Architects

The Harudot consists of three interconnected buildings which hold a meeting room, kitchen, and toilets. The various rooms have been arranged in a rectilinear form to the north, while the seating area is situated to the south. The southern structures hold circular areas of planting, wherein the gable roofs pull open, allowing natural light to stream in from above. This unique roof opening also allows a large baobab tree to grow!

“The building is separated into smaller masses to make it more human-scale, which established different zones such as the bar, coffee drinking zone, a lounge, a meeting room, and restrooms. The giant gable roof form of each mass is pulled apart at certain parts, allowing the tree to penetrate through a void to the sky creating a semi-outdoor space underneath. It appears as if the seed of the baobab has been planted long before and grew out through the architecture as time passes,” said IDIN Architects.

You are welcomed into the two curving structures via large triangular entrances that accommodate full-height glazing incorporating doors that connect the various external seating areas to the interiors, forming a well-connected and free-flowing space. Although the three forms are distinct and separate on the outside, internally they are connected via large arched openings. The stone floor is marked with flowing lines and embedded text, which builds a serene sense of continuity.

Harudot’s exterior is quite appealing, as it is clad in vertical blackened timber planks that accentuate the cafe’s curving form, which contrasts with the pale timber and black furniture and fittings. The entire identity of the cafe is inspired by Japanese design, which IDIN Architects describes as “humble simplicity with attention to details”.

The post The Harudot Cafe Features A Curving Form With A Baobab Tree Growing Through It first appeared on Yanko Design.

Minimal cafe with glass panels + floating corners is a tranquil haven to grab a cup of joe in hectic Bangkok

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Nestled in the bustling and hectic city of Bangkok is an adorable coffee shop called the Double Slash // Coffee Space. Designed by Spacy Architecture, the cafe is inspired by the international style that grew popular during the Art Deco period in the 1930s. The cafe borrowed the period’s aerodynamic design, functioning as a space that is simple yet free-flowing and dynamic. It is marked by flowy lines and seamless movements.

Designer: Spaccy Architecture

The coffee shop is fitted into a horizontal framework with a minimal, clean, and tassel-free design. It is devoid of unnecessary ornamentations and is defined by flowy curving forms and angular planning orientation. The structure is topped by a flat roof, with glass panels and floating corners, creating a clear connection between the interiors and the exteriors. The transparent facade of the cafe makes the space seem cozy and homely, and the interiors are bright and warm, which instantly invite you in for a cup of joe. The light installed within the cafe is indirect, so it doesn’t seem too harsh or uncomfortable.

The floor features a two-toned oblique pattern, and the interior and exterior seating areas are separated via a discreet glass panel. The connected wood tables create a visual connection between the indoor and outdoor sections. Concrete finishings on the counter and wooden elements provide a raw naturality to the space. The original space was founded by an industrial designer who spent years practicing forest tradition in Isan, Thailand. “Double Slash” comes from what he usually uses to create space amongst his ideas while working. These parallel oblique lines are not only the common written symbols used by him, but they also symbolize flow, movement, and continuity.

The intention and aim behind designing this tranquil coffee shop was to create a cafe that serves as a space of contemplation and mindfulness in the otherwise chaotic city of Bangkok. It attempts to provide the citizens of Bangkok with a quaint spot to relax, unwind, and grab a cuppa. The visual language and brand identity of the cafe were created to support this persona – one of peace, fluidity, and spaciousness.

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Tokyo’s unique Blue Bottle Cafe offers a safe experience for introverts & coffee lovers!

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If I want to be more productive, I usually go work in a cafe to have a change of space or do a coffee run as a reward for finishing my tasks. But ever since the pandemic started, it has almost been impossible to work in a cafe but it has also become trickier to pick up coffee while making sure sanitizer doesn’t get into it! But this Blue Bottle Coffee pop-up in Shibuya, Tokyo is making that little normal part of our lives safer by creating a contactless experience to get our coffees using AI robots.

The interior architecture is designed to utilize the technology of AI cafe robot ‘Root C’ which is a service that lets you order from a screen and pick up your fresh coffee from a capsule. There are multiple slots that make up a whole wall of lockers and it almost looks like capsule hotels but tinier for your drink!

Designed by the Schema Architectural Plan, the capsules resemble a beehive. Wood is used to add warmth and translucent acrylic that covers the capsule is inspired by the glow of honey. It is designed to make you feel comfortable even if you are staying for a short time, taking home a drink.

It is a simple way to adapt to the demand for contactless service and safety while still making it a pleasant experience (especially when compared to a drive-thru!). When the barista places the coffee in the locker, the capsule glows to alert you that you can pick up your drink.

The ordering and receiving locker system is only available in Blue Bottle’s Shibuya location for now. Not only does it reduce the risk of transmission and protect people, but it is also a blessing for introverts in all circumstances – ordering without interacting with anyone.

Designer: Schema Architectural Plan, New Innovations, and Blue Bottle Coffee

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This Modular Café lets your ‘pick and choose’ your kitchen appliance, delivering an easily customizable station to brew your favorite coffee!

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One of the things I miss the most is the smell my neighborhood coffee shop entices with. While our lifestyle is returning to normal, I still don’t feel comfortable entering crowded places, including the aforementioned coffee shop. With the idea of a modular café – the designers prefer to call Oblige – we can decrease the load from our kitchen and get the best of what the café down the street promises. How do you ask? By creating one sleek appliance, you can easily install it anywhere in your home without worrying about connecting multiple power/water outlets to keep it functioning!

Meet the Oblige, an entertainment space where homeowners can depict their personal traits by customizing the modular appliance to their individual lifestyle or living space. The modular cafe intends to go beyond the idea of the basic functions the appliances in your kitchen perform. The designers behind Oblige feel setting up a café at home is inconvenient for now because it’s not easy to set up space with all the appliances required. Connecting them all to water and electrical sources is another headache. Simply thinking of brewing a good coffee – you need a list of appliances – from your coffee grinder, the pod-maker, espresso brewer, milk frother, and more, depending on your choice!

Oblige lets the user select and combine an appliance (ice maker, soda maker, water purifier, coffee grinder, espresso machine, kettle, and oven) as per their convenience and preference. If the need arises, users can combine more modules to cater to their extended demand while retaining visually similar aesthetics. These products club up together with a simple mechanism in the bottom; adding and removing them or installing the café setup on modular furniture outside the kitchen is feasible as Oblige will work on one power and water supply connection, irrespective of the interconnected modules needed in the setup.

If you’re looking to achieve a café-like experience, to quench the urge of working out of a Starbucks, an Oblige can really oblige you through the setup one day. It’s the designer’s vision to partner with furniture and lifestyle companies going forward to deliver, say, a LEGO-style modular café for your apartment someday.

Designer: Soo Jung Hwang, Seongyong Lee, Ki-Beom Hwang

This tiny tea café fits in a 1.5 sq. ft. fold-out box on the back of a Vespa

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Ask any Indian what their country runs on and the answer will inevitably come, “Chai”. Introduced to the country by the British and the Portuguese, Chai (or tea) is as much of a legacy to India as the New York Pizza Slice or the Chicago Deep Dish is to America. We’ve taken the drink and co-opted it, introducing our rich culture and complex flavors and spices to what’s otherwise a simple beverage of tea leaves, water, milk, and sugar. Today, chai can be found everywhere – At tiny roadside stalls in the city or on highways, and even in the up-market urban Chai cafés that are the “tea-quivalent” of Starbucks. However, possibly the most iconic form of Chai is found on the roads, sold by people on push-carts or even out of canteens on the back of scooters. The CHAIGAADI builds on that culture, modernizing it and turning it into even more of an icon.

ChaiGaadi is the world’s tiniest tea stall ever made. At just 1.5 sq. ft, the foldable tea stall fits right on the back of a Vespa, allowing the tea vendor to easily set up shop anywhere and sell tea along with select confectionery and snacks. Everything fits right into a 1.5 sq. ft. box that’s mounted on the back of a Vespa. Designed to work like a food truck, traveling from location to location (and often parking outside large offices in the evenings to businessmen can get their ‘chai break’), the ChaiGaadi can be set up anywhere in minutes. The box opens out into an elaborate setup comprising a copper tea boiler, a cup-warming tray fitted with signature ‘cutting chai’ drinking glasses, a tray for confectionery like buns and tea-cakes, and a fold-out counter for serving your wares and collecting cash. Once consumed, used tea glasses can even be docked in a special tray on the side, along with a small compartment for food waste.

The copper construction on the tea boiler is a bit of creative fusion from the designer, Arun Prabhu. Inspired by the copper glasses used by Turkish baristas to brew their coffee, the ChaiGaadi’s copper boiler relies on the metal’s conductivity while hinting at that cultural inspiration from the Middle East. Vents on the top of the boiler serve two purposes. Not only do they help keep the chai-glasses above warm (the vendor or ‘chaiwallah could pre-pour 10-15 glasses to quickly serve hot to customers), but they even occasionally let out steam, spreading the familiar whiff of strong milky tea in the air.

“We spent months prototyping, itching to find the right balance between usability and the skeleton of the structure”, says Arun Prabhu, founder of cross-disciplinary design and research firm The BILLBOARDS® Collective, and the designer of the ChaiGaadi. Touted as the world’s tiniest tea café, the ChaiGaadi was designed for Hyderabad-based cafe chain, Chai Kahaani, and is currently going through testing and trials as it prepares for an eventual nationwide rollout.

Designer: Arun Prabhu NG

This upcycled coffee shop + roastery’s plant-filled design is built up of 80% construction waste!

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Coffee shops are daylight’s social hubs, where people across town come to catch up with old friends, study for final exams, or just have a cup of coffee and people-watch. The design and setup of coffee shops make all the difference when you’re looking for one to spend the day. Rene Kralovič, head roaster and founder of coffee roasting company Rusty Nails, knows this well and built Grounds, a coffee hub and roastery in Karlín, Prague, where 80% of its interior was assembled using upcycled construction site waste from a previously dismantled project.

Grounds was initially conceptualized by Kralovič as a public center where the concept of a roastery could be expanded to include the surrounding coffee community. In order to weave this goal throughout the planning and building of Grounds, the building’s construction was designed and assembled following a hands-on approach by the local coffee community. With 80% of Grounds’ interior coming from construction waste from previously abandoned projects, most of the furniture was refurbished and repurposed for use in a coffee shop. The light fixtures derive from inactive weapons factories, the concrete, and wooden coffee tables were hand-made on-site, and the bar is built from uncoated corrugated sheets of metal. Today, Grounds operates as a public hub where the coffee can be served straight from its own roastery.

The coffee shop is also split up that way– coffee shop and roastery. Grounds is contained within a street building, where a center structure keeps the shop’s roastery and sales floor. The built-in inner room is designated as a showroom for coffee competitions, testing, and roasting. Facing the shop’s main entrance, the inner room opens up as the sales area where customers can purchase a drink and then follow the tangerine-colored side staircase up to the shop’s upper working space or social hub. The working space’s perimeter is wrapped up in corrugated sheets of plastic that create nooks and crannies where plants can grow and help purify the upstairs air while receiving plenty of natural sunlight from Grounds’ open skylight.

Designer: Rene Kralovič x Rusty Nails

Grounds’ built-in inner room contains the shop’s roastery and showroom.

Grounds coffee shop features an upstairs working space and downstairs meeting place.

From the behind, Grounds coffee shop’s inner room has a translucent covering and remains accessible by the general public.

Situated in front of Grounds coffee shop’s sales floor, a cafeteria allows customers to sit, chat, and enjoy their coffee.

 

Just beyond the front counter, Grounds coffee shop’s roastery hides away in the building’s innermost room.

On one side of the inner room, a tangerine staircase leads customers to the Grounds’ working area upstairs.

Contained within a wrapping of corrugated plastic sheets, the working area is zoned off from the rest of Grounds.

Entering Grounds’ working area, customers are greeted with pots of plants and greenery that work to help clean the air and maintain humidity levels for the coffee roasting process.

A skylight brings in natural sunlight to open up the upstairs area and helps to feed the space’s many plants.

South Korean cafe uses robotic baristas to comply with social distancing

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With its COVID-19 outbreak seemingly contained, South Korea may offer the rest of the world a glimpse of what society could look like after the pandemic ends -- and it may include robotic baristas. According to Reuters, a cafe in Daejeon, South Korea...

From recycled shipping containers to entirely cardboard built, these cafes will find a spot on your bucket list

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Cafe’s have surely and steadily integrated themselves into our lifestyle, from quick pit-stops to refuel our caffeine hit to leisurely catching up with people or even a book. Cafe’s have been designed to replace that warmth we crave on a rainy day, with the smell of coffee enticing you all the way, and this particular collection of designed spaces are here to redefine the traditional coffee space. Breaking the traditional warm palette of Starbucks, we have this design constructed completely from recycled shipping containers, a cafe that is build using cardboard to ones that even feature koi ponds inside them, these cafes will surely bring you zen while you sip on that perfectly brewed drink.

Japanese architect Kengo Kuma has stacked 29 recycled shipping containers to make a Starbucks coffee shop alongside a shopping center in Hualien, Taiwan

Facebook is opening up five pop-up cafes across UK where users can get a check on their privacy settings while getting a free cup of coffee! Facebook hopes that these cafes will help increase awareness on how easy it is to set up their privacy settings, helping users know who exactly can see their data

Indian architecture studio Nudes has built an entire cafe in Mumbai using cardboard to design the space. Everything apart from Cardboard Cafe’s core, shell and services in the cafe have been made from cardboard. Walls, chairs, tables and even lampshades have all been sculpted from pieces of the corrugated material

The Waveon cafe in Gijang, South Korea is made up of a series of enormous concrete volumes that are stacked and rotated to optimize views of the East China Sea by Heesoo Kwak and IDMM Architects

La Linda is an artisanal cafe and bakery built within a 1927 garden house in Uruguay’s capital by Pedro Livni Arquitecto

Italian architect Giuseppe Gurrieri designed the eco-bar with folding exterior wall panels along the side of the building that faces the road, creating the occasional tables

The Hanoi Cafe in Vietnam features a fish pond, an indoor waterfall and a rooftop vegetable patch that exists in a self-sustaining eco-system by the Farming Architects

A former power station in Melbourne has been converted into a cafe and restaurant with exposed brickwork and a modern grungy vibe by Collingwood-based DesignOffice

Wes Anderson’s film, The Grand Budapest Hotel is the inspiration for the Budapest Cafe in Chengdu, China and utilizes marble surfaces with geometric elevations and pastel hues to evoke that feel by Biasol

This laundromat in New York includes lounge areas and a coffee shop, as a welcoming alternative to other coin-operated wash places common across the city by Sisters Corinna and Theresa Williams

Court blocks Trump’s delay of fuel efficiency penalties

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The Trump administration's efforts to undo car efficiency guidelines just hit a major obstacle. A federal court has blocked a White House attempt to delay the implementation of a rule toughening penalties for automakers that don't meet national fuel...