Deepsea Coffee / Knowhere Studio

Interiors Designers: Knowhere Studio
Location: Shop 10, Building 25, Binjiang Junyuan, Zhangguanying Road, Panlong District, Kunming, Yunnan, China
Architect In Charge: Nan Yang
Design Team: Nan Yang, Yunlong Lu, Yi Wu, Zhengwei Song, Min Peng , Jian Gao
Participants: Yunnan Fulong Design Office Co., Ltd
Area: 164.0 m2
Project Year: 2018
Photographs: Yixiang Wang

Text description provided by the architects. The project is located in Binjiang Junyuan District, Zhangguanying Road, Panlong District, Kunming City, Yunnan Province. Binjiang Junyuan 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 on the city. There are not only a few large urban complexes, but also several primary and secondary schools, office and business districts, which give a huge young consumer group to satisfy the consumption level of 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.

Second floor space. Image © Yixiang Wang

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 designer think why is the deep sea blue? ? Then the designer found that the reason why the sea is blue is because 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 – mirror, Metals, acrylics, plastics,

In the design of the main dining area for ground and first floors, we use the blue ceiling to occupy the main color of the space, and the rest of the space takes the ideas of transparency to create a “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 aluminum 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 gray mirror appears in all the area except 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.

Light Reflect stairs. Image © Yixiang Wang

In addition, many transparent furniture is used, and the furniture mainly made of acrylic, inflatable plastic and glass, which makes the indoor part uniformly express the sparkling and transparent feeling of the deep sea.

First floor bar counter. Image © Yixiang Wang

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 diverse needs of contemporary living models.