Recently featured as part of our ShowCase series,  "Restaurant on the Sea" by CASE-REAL is an elegant restaurant located smack on the coastline of Teshima, a tiny island in Japan's Seto Inland Sea. Opening for the Setouchi Triennale, the restaurant continues to serve local Japanese fare to the island's 1,000 inhabitants, after the art-seeking tourists' exodus.

The modest project description left us wanting more, so we asked CASE-REAL to comment on a few of the restaurant's details. 

Archinect: What kind of food will the restaurant serve?

CASE-REAL (Ritsu Shibata): You can eat Japanese food in this restaurant, using the local ingredients including seafood from Setouchi Ocean. The restaurant serves a lunch menu, along with a prix fixe dinner menu (only with reservation).

Archinect: What was the inspiration behind the public kitchen?

CASE-REAL: The idea of the "public kitchen" was originally requested by the owner, Ms. Mitsuko Fukutake, who is also a councilor of Fukutake Foundation, the organizer of the Setouchi Triennale. She was concerned by the very real circumstances on Teshima that there wasn’t a place to eat and serve food with local ingredients, even though the island has great sources of seafood, vegetables and so on. That was the reason we started this project.

The use of the public kitchen is still in the process phase, however Fukutake is proud that we could provide such a space for the people who live on the island to serve their food with their own local ingredients. As a designer, Koichi Futatsumata laid out the public kitchen space to be easily accessible, directly from the terrace. Futatsumata also used same floor materials for both kitchen and terrace; all doors can be fully opened, so we could create one big unified space.

Archinect: How is the restaurant's design related to the landscape?

CASE-REAL: Looking out at the nature of Teshima with its site of an ocean view and considering its use as a restaurant, we had an image of a light shape. That is where the idea of using an arch derived from. Also, the 40m length is to reflect and imply the extensive ocean.

Semi-transparent polycarbonate wave plates have been installed on the ceiling and the roof of the terrace, and the passageway from north to south. By doing so, natural light is being brought into the interior. Galvalume wave plate, with the same pitch used on the roof, has been installed on the exterior walls along with the interior walls of the terrace, restaurant and public kitchen. By applying the same surface material on the exterior and several interior walls, we strived to maintain the feeling of looking out to the ocean from the inside and ensure continuity of the same atmosphere of the exterior and interior. A red-brown colored concrete has been used for the foundation and slab. In contrast to the blue sky and the ocean, along with the greenery in Teshima, we thought the colored concrete was better suited than the grey concrete.

Click here to read the ShowCase feature about "Restaurant on the Sea."