Turning Our Attention Towards The Café Design

This week in the studio, our group hit a wall. We realised our mistake, being that we had focussed a lot of our attention towards developing a really concise plan for the exhibition space that when it came to the other areas such as the cafe and workshop, we had much less of a solid idea and if we didn't change our approach, our overall design would be lacking. This meant that we spent much of this week creating a well researched and developed narrative for the cafe space before we complete the overall floor plan. 

We wanted to have a sense of congruence throughout the bottom floor, with an overriding connection to the company and their design principles. Stella McCartney’s passion for vegetarian clothing design will be reflected in the cafe as it will be centred around sustainably sourced vegetarian food; the space itself encapsulating this atmosphere through elements such as, but not limited to, texture, colour, lighting and materiality. 

In order to develop these initial ideas, we individually completed research in alternative areas of this concept to later collate them all as one, blending all of our ideas into one. I researched vegetarian cafes in a broad sense, collating my findings on a mind map, creating links to the brand and the rest of the project.

We wanted to really explore the keywords we associated with the brand at the beginning of our project research. Fluidity, empowerment and circulatory were words that we found most accurately encompassed Stella McCartney’s work and I noted ways in which this could be considered in the approach we take to the cafe. In regards to fluidity, I believe that the different areas of the building having a seamless transition will create this atmosphere. Repurposing materials for use within the cafe would emulate the circulatory aspect and the sense of empowerment will be evoked within users by promoting the idea that vegetarian/ vegan food is less environmentally damaging. 

I also found examples of relevant precedents to help give us a starting point for the space. Now, as a group, we all have a much more advanced understanding of how we want the cafe to feel, we will all be able to work together on a 1:50 scale floor plan drawing that is a collaboration of all our creative efforts.

Once this is completed, we will need to repeat the process regarding the workshop mezzanine area and work on seamlessly blending together all of the different rooms and functions within the space; creating one coherent design.