Text description provided by the architects. The concept rotates around the idea of serving healthy food, providing sophisticated yet informal seating settings with soft chairs, benches and places for gathering, laying down and relaxing with friends.
Green Option is the off-line branch of a well known Chinese company selling salads and healty food online. Main request for the new store was about creating a place that could interpret and reflect the highest company vision and values, clear space, healthy food, meditative environment that may allow customers to detach form urban crowd and noise.
Each room offers a different functional program. Café, restaurant, cocktail bar and an external patio are all served by a central kitchen and organized along a backbone corridor where an open display bakery is facing. In some much smaller rooms we managed to get a bathroom, a small office and two storage/technical rooms. The project develops a design strategy that aims to sew up the randomly fragmented spaces on first floor of a multifunctional building, while taking advantage of the articulated layout for organizing the new functions.
White curved iron strips on ceiling, separated by acrylic and LED lighting lines, characterize the whole environment. They rhythm the space and constitute the main spatial feature, creating large common spaces and defining smaller intimate ones, by enlarging and shrinking to fit the size of different rooms. Light gray concrete surfaces on walls create an uniform background where the white iron strips stand out from, like large drawers been infilled into a pre-existing concrete box. Feeling of each room has been further emphasized by custom-made use of platform setting, different seating types and specific colors for the furniture fabric. The space is offering in fact the possibility of multiple seating choices, organized around a system of platforms and benches with different widths and heights, able to satisfy the need of youngest Chinese customers, to relax and have a tea, chatting with friends, or having a quick meal while working on your laptop. Custom made pillows, dwarf sofas, chairs and stools covered with waterproof fabric by Italian brand Irisun, integrate the seating system adding softness and an accent of color, with a dominant tone which differs for each room.
The continuous terrazzo floor has been poured-in-place and polished by skilled artisans for over three weeks. Its different stone grains and gray color tones contribute to mark the specific program on different areas with steps and platforms. Terrazzo texture raises up on all surfaces in the bakery space to define walls and built-in display cabinets for bread and pastry. Up to 7 meter long iron framed sliding fences on wheels can be partially close to seal the different areas, creating movable screens, which add depth to the visual perspectives on corridor. Brushed steel surfaces has been used for technical and service functions, including counters, doors and displays. Metal reflection and vibrancy echoes on the mirror finished steel used for the tailor-made lighting fixtures specifically designed and realized for the project.
