- Year: 2015
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Photographs:Spaceshift Studio
Text description provided by the architects. Choui Fong Tea Café is located in the area of Choui Fong tea plantation where is covering with a number of huge hills.
Instead of locating the tea café on the hilltop, the architect decided to lay the buildings hidden in the hill but outreach to take the view of plantation.
The idea is to keep the hill top view where the building rooftop would then be a 360-degree viewpoint of the plantation. Here at the rooftop, in addition to the natural atmosphere of the plantation, the visitors can do observe the farmers’ activity, tea leaves ‘hand pick’ harvesting during the day.
The main building is composed of three buildings; they are floated and outreached from different viewpoints. The functional areas included dining zone, café, teashop, and toilets. Scale and proportion of them are various and depended on those usage of each building.
The structure is challenged point, we can see they are floating when we look at them from the foot hill and only one pile appears to bear the entire building. The retaining wall at the back is set into a distance of the building to create an extra space for the green courtyard to provide shade and shadow in this area.
There is another separated building of toilets for visitors at the parking lot; this is to alleviate the visitor circulation during the high season. Same as with the main building, this toilet building is also hidden under the hill and also composed with stone and green courtyard for shady.
