Our client wished to combine a menswear store and thirty-table café/ restaurant in an existing commercial space.  In order to connect these different programmatic needs, we conceptualized project as kind of house. 

To emphasize the identity of the client as a menswear brand, we gave the building the character of being covered with a pliable fabric where the door and window frames appear to be literally pushed out of the building. In reality, the exterior surfaces are covered in molded fiberglass panels with a plaster stucco finish to achieve the smooth and stretched quality. 

The exterior terrace also was developed using associative qualities combining material characteristics and the viewer’s experience. The colorful canopy, made of 1000 pounds of thread hanging from a steel structure, has tactile qualities of softness, and is visually vibrant blending and enhancing the surrounding vegetation. 

Other materials are textural and offer a bright and neutral backdrop for the colourful products on display. The concrete block walls are finished internally with white painted chipboard panels, while the floor is polished concrete.