Camden Café Design
A renovation to a Camden café that has successfully diversified its services during Covid-19, so were looking to add a wine bar and a plant shop to their small café premises.
Limited by space and playing on the Camden café’s name; ‘The Fields Beneath’, Cherry Architects developed the idea of elevating all of the planting onto a rope network above head height; resulting in an interactive experience of walking below a sea of hanging plants, mirroring the earthy aesthetic of the café’s vegan menu.
With such a small café site situated within a Victorian railway arch in Camden, it was a highly ambitious undertaking to fit so many functions into one space – a design process involving modelling down to the smallest item of furniture.
A space defined by the clever re-use of the existing.
The exposed brickwork of the railway arches will set the raw aesthetic of the space; Cherry Architects were not limited to a specific palette and allowed the materiality to develop organically. Planting and bold yellow colour tones will be accented around the space, in keeping with the Camden café brand.
Low-cost lighting strings will run parallel with the planting which illuminate the leaves at night time when operating as a wine bar.
Needing to maximise the amount of seating, a mezzanine floor will be added to house the kitchen and pantry. Adding a new entrance to the side – bifolding doors and an awning – mean that a large amount of café seating will be added externally, in the alleyway and beneath the railway arch.
