The project is located in BinjiangJunyuan District, Zhangguanying Road, Panlong District, Kunming City, Yunnan Province. BinjiangJunyuan is the former Zhangguanying Village and Zhangguanying Flea Market. It is one of the largest urban villages in Kunming's Second Ring Road. Now it has been transformed into a large-planned urban residential area based in the city. There are not only a few large urban complexes but also several primary and secondary schools, offices and business districts, which give a huge young consumer group to satisfy the consumption level by creating a new experience cafe.
The project is located on the ground floor of the tower apartment. It used to be a beauty salon. It is not an ideal location for a city cafe, but the owner is confident to create a large enough flow of people through a good design and Internet marketing.
Since the owner determined that the name of the cafe was “deep sea”, the designer took the time to think about what intrinsic meaning could use. Unlike conventional thinking and common design logistics, when searching for reference pictures, such designs are all with blue features, but the concept of "deep sea" makes the designer think why is the deep sea blue ? Then the designer found that the reason why the sea is blue is that the sky is blue, the water body (space) is transparent, so the color of the sea is created by Light and material rather than design itself. With this logic, the design of the entire space is very clear, the original hanging ceiling is removed, and the blue "sky" is painted with paint; the space below uses reflective/transparent materials - mirrors, Metals, acrylics, plastics, etc.
In the design of the main dining area for the ground and first floors, we use the blue ceiling to occupy the main colour of the space, and the rest of the space takes the ideas of transparency to create an “inside water feeling”(opaque –mirror – reflection – refraction – transparent –translucent – white – light). Therefore, in order to create these effects, the selection of materials and furniture are the core issues for this design.
For the opaque materials, the white wall uses the most common latex paint, and the ground uses a slightly reflective white epoxy. The reflective surface material is a brushed aluminium plate, which is used for special attributes such as edge banding, baseboard and bar. For the translucent material, at the beginning of the design, the glass film is prepared on the outer window glass, and the stair space is also decided to use a translucent polycarbonate plate to highlight the transparent and intimate effect of some spaces.
For the mirror material, the use of mirrored glass increases the space extension and openness, while the mirror surface is fixed to the wall through the multi-layer wooden board, and the LED has been hidden in the slot of the wooden board. The light strip creates the effect of a mirror suspended in the air. In the design, a grey mirror appears in all the areas except a blue mirror is used in the stair space to emphasize the reflection effect. The large-area mirror of the stair space matches the light source from different places, and the diffuse reflection of different levels on the blue top surface creates a magic effect.
In addition, many transparent pieces of furniture is used, and the furniture is mainly made of acrylic, inflatable plastic and glass, which makes the indoor part uniformly express the sparkling and transparent feeling of the deep sea.
An innovative café is not constrained by the definition of a traditional café, which accommodates the leisure needs of different contemporary urbanites: this café contains functions of catering, exhibition, video, party and social communication. Here, many events that you want and can't think of can happen, the space has great flexibility and uncertainty, so we don't give a clear definition of space attributes, and hope the users can adapt it to the diverse needs of contemporary living models.
Project name: Deepseacoffe
Architect’ Firm: Parallect Design
Website: www.parallect-design.com
Contact e-mail: nan.yang@ parallect-design.com
Lead Architects: Nan Yang
Design Team: Yang Nan, Lu Yunlong, Wu Yi, Song Zhengwei, Peng Min , Gao Jian
Project Location: Shop 10, Building 25, BinjiangJunyuan, Zhangguanying Road, Panlong District, Kunming, Yunnan, China
Completion Year: 2018
Gross Built Area (square meters): 164
Photo credits: Yixiang Wang
Other participants (eg. collaborators, clients, consultants, etc):
Yunnan Fulong Design Office Co., Ltd
