Cheese Tart Shop BAKE / 07BEACH

Architects: 07BEACH
Location: Saigon One Tower, Bến Nghé, Quận 1, Hồ Chí Minh, Vietnam
Lead Architect: Joe Chikamori
Area: 69.6 m2
Project Year: 2017
Photographs: Hiroyuki Oki

Contractor: PLATINUM A.I CORPORATION

Text description provided by the architects. The major design components for the first shop in Vietnam of Japanese cheese tart brand BAKE.To utilize the property’s character which faces a street and has a double-height ceiling, The stairs from the entrance to the cashier was designed to show passersby customers are queuing in a vertical direction. It made each tart-display table be stair-like and inside floor for staff be sloped. It was required from the client to show inside openly rather than constructing optical border between staffs and customers.

In seeking something light touch for that, the idea to hold the table with a point-fixing bolt attached to glass has come up. In computer rendering, I sometimes apply different lightness on each surface of the same material to emphasize a shade of an object. The same method was taken in the real construction, applying the lighter color of mortar on horizontal and darker one on vertical surfaces of stairs.

Also, the lighter mortar was applied to walls in staff area and the darker one to customer area and accordingly the amount of light to the staff area was designed brighter so that it got highlighted like a stage. Displaying tarts to passersby is important for BAKE. However, the store’s floor level is higher than a street by 400mm, Due to that level difference, only slightly side of tarts can be seen from a street. To complement this, the stair-like mirrored ceiling was designed to reflect tarts to a street.