Tag Archives: cafe

The Café That Refuses to Take the Scaffolding Down

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A parking lot is useful right up until someone asks you to spend an afternoon in one. At BAG Café in Riyadh, AO Architects took a former parking yard and made it a reason to stay rather than a place to leave your car. That feels like a small but meaningful fix for a familiar problem: cafés need room for people to gather, while the space around them is often designed only for traffic.

The other problem is harder to measure. Coffee shops can blur together, even when their interiors are expensive and meticulously styled. BAG gives people a place they can recognize at a glance. A grid of red construction scaffolding stretches over the outdoor area and continues into the ceiling inside. Instead of hiding the thing that usually signals a building isn’t finished, the architects made it part of the finished design.

Designer: AO Architects

That reversal is more interesting than a clever photo opportunity. Scaffolding is normally a promise that something else is coming. Here, it becomes part of the place people came to see. The architects describe the project as using a temporary construction system to create a lasting presence. I like how little explanation it needs once you picture someone sitting under those bright red bars with a coffee in hand.

The red has a practical logic, too. The scaffolding’s standard industrial finish already matched BAG’s brand color, so it could be used without repainting. It is rare to find branding that feels this inseparable from the architecture. The café does not need a giant logo in every photograph to announce itself. Its structure does that work, while still looking like a structure rather than a prop.

Over the gravel-covered yard, woven cloth associated with traditional goat-hair tents stretches across the scaffolding. It offers shade and gives the hard geometry a softer edge. The pairing connects two very different ways of making shelter: one tied to contemporary construction, the other to a regional tradition of portable tents. The contrast could have felt like a concept looking for a café. Here, it gives the outdoor seating a character of its own.

Inside, corrugated galvanized steel runs from the exterior into the café without being painted to resemble anything more polished. Concrete underfoot keeps the palette straightforward. Those choices matter because exposed materials are often asked to perform authenticity. BAG seems less interested in looking unfinished than in deciding which parts are worth finishing differently. The metal is metal. The scaffolding stays visible. Neither needs a decorative apology.

This was not a matter of dropping a new building onto an empty lot. The existing structure was rehabilitated, while the kitchen and service areas were rebuilt. The drive-thru lane remained in use. That combination gives the project an appealing sense of proportion: change the parts that need changing, keep the parts that still work, and let the former parking yard have a better life as outdoor space.

For visitors, the payoff is simple. You can choose the ease of a drive-thru or sit outside under a canopy that makes the setting feel intentional, not like a few tables left beside the curb. The grid also carries the same visual language from outside to in, so the café feels like one coherent place. None of that requires you to know the architect’s concept before ordering.

I appreciate that BAG doesn’t ask its industrial materials to pretend they are luxurious. It trusts the arrangement of ordinary things to be memorable: a red frame, a gravel yard, a length of fabric, a sheet of metal. That is a useful idea beyond cafés. A space does not always need a fresh skin or a blank slate to become somewhere people want to be.

The strongest part of the design may be its restraint. It makes room for an afternoon where there used to be parking, but it never erases the site’s earlier purpose entirely. Cars can still pass through the drive-thru; people can now choose to linger. BAG Café offers a gentle reminder that a place can change its job without having to hide how it got there.

The post The Café That Refuses to Take the Scaffolding Down first appeared on Yanko Design.

Blue Bottle Coffee’s Harajuku Cafe Is a Study in Restraint Done Right

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Walk into most cafes, and they’re already selling you something — exposed brick, neon signs, mismatched furniture, a playlist that changes every twenty minutes. Then there’s the Blue Bottle Coffee Harajuku cafe by TEKI Design, which says almost nothing, and means all of it.

Tucked into one of Tokyo’s most visually chaotic neighborhoods, the Harajuku outpost functions as a deliberate counterweight to its surroundings. Harajuku is a place of spectacle — streetwear drops, cosplay, fashion tribes colliding on narrow sidewalks. TEKI Design’s response was to strip everything back. The cafe earns its calm rather than performing it.

Designer: TEKI Design

The interior leans into a vocabulary that feels distinctly Japanese in its economy of means. Clean lines, natural materials, and a spatial arrangement that prioritizes the ritual of coffee over the theatre of the brand. Light enters the space softly, falls across surfaces without drama, and leaves the room feeling like something you want to stay inside of. That quality — the sense of earned stillness — is harder to design than it looks.

TEKI Design has long understood that in a city as dense and stimulating as Tokyo, the most radical gesture a space can make is to ask nothing of you. The Harajuku cafe does exactly that. There’s no moment where the architecture competes with the coffee, or the coffee competes with the conversation. Each element holds its position and then steps aside.

Blue Bottle’s presence in Japan has always felt more considered than its American counterparts. The brand arrived in Tokyo in 2015 with a clear awareness that it was operating in a country with a coffee culture that predated its own by decades. That awareness shows up in spaces like this one — not as deference, but as genuine dialogue. The Harajuku cafe doesn’t try to look Japanese. It simply engages with what good Japanese design has always understood: that space is as much about what you remove as what you place.

The result is a cafe that photographs beautifully and experiences even better. A single cup of their single-origin pour-over, consumed in a room this quietly composed, lands differently than the same cup consumed anywhere noisier. That’s not pretension. That’s design working exactly the way it should — invisibly, in service of the thing you came for. In a neighborhood built on maximalism, TEKI Design and Blue Bottle Coffee have made the smallest possible move. It turns out that was the boldest one available.

The post Blue Bottle Coffee’s Harajuku Cafe Is a Study in Restraint Done Right first appeared on Yanko Design.

This New London Café Has a Ceiling Inspired by St Paul’s Dome, and It Sits Right on the Thames

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The stretch of the Thames running between Tate Modern and St Paul’s is one of those London views that never quite loses its effect — and London studio Cake Architecture made that exact backdrop the entire design brief for WatchHouse’s newest café, a 60-seat riverside space that absorbs some of the city’s most iconic architecture and folds it into something intimate and grounded.

The project sits directly beside the Thames, though it never leans on the view as a crutch. The design operates at a more atmospheric level, rooted in the tension between the monumental permanence of London’s skyline and the restless, shifting energy of the river running past it. It’s a conceptual starting point that could easily stay theoretical. Here, it doesn’t.

Designer: Cake Architecture

That thinking earns its keep through specific, well-resolved gestures. The most arresting is a dramatic circular void carved into the ceiling, a spatial echo of St Paul’s dome, translated from the sacred to the everyday. Below it, a monolithic espresso counter holds the room together, its weight and material language borrowed from Tate Modern’s industrial character and the infrastructural logic of the riverbanks themselves. Neither move is decorative. Both shift the room into territory that most café designs never reach.

The palette is handled with the same restraint. Colour is drawn from the immediate surroundings: the tonal range of the river at different hours, the bleached stone of the embankment walls, the open and often overcast London sky. Back-painted finishes introduce a soft iridescence to the surfaces, so the room doesn’t read as a fixed thing. It responds to the time of day, softening in morning light and warming as the afternoon settles in.

WatchHouse has always been deliberate about place; each of its London locations takes its visual cues from the neighbourhood it occupies, but this Thames-side outpost feels like one of the most fully resolved in the portfolio. The 60-seat space will serve rare and special coffees alongside breakfast, viennoiserie, and bakery options, giving the room both the footfall and the menu to justify the ambition behind its design. For Cake Architecture, it’s another assured project from a studio building a reputation for spaces that think carefully about where they are. Here, the scale is modest, and the mood is quiet, and it’s all the stronger for it.

The post This New London Café Has a Ceiling Inspired by St Paul’s Dome, and It Sits Right on the Thames first appeared on Yanko Design.

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.