The young design firm CGGM understood the catering company’s café as a metaphoric window onto the kitchen. Customers can sense that the bustle beyond the café space is part of a larger undertaking. To achieve this, the architects pulled an abstraction of the kitchen to the storefront, in order to create a relationship with t he customer. The space borrows the kitchen’s material language in the form of tile and stainless steel. The customer is in the kitchen. Applied to the given terrain of the retail space, the materials shift between the planar and the volumetric, creating zones of use. Te central area is defend by a 15’-0’’ cascade of tile that erupts into a chunky ceramic mass which forms the main counter of the café. Materials also vary in the quality of their surfaces: from matte to reflective, from hard to soft. The hard stainless steel surfaces of the buffet area transforms into soft lounge seating that by shape and color alludes to metal. Material mimicry occurs.

Programme

Pharmaceutical laboratory

Location

Fully, VS

Year

2013-2014

Client

Anne et Jean-Boris von Roten

Procedure

Direct mandate

Photography

Eik Frenzel