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Chernyi Coffee Roasters Cooperative/ FREYA Architects
- area:
140 square meters
Year:
2023
-
Chief Architect:
Kristina Koivestonen-Hatramajian
Text description provided by the architect. When we rented the house, the builder had begun removing the old historic bricks. We ask that they be retained for use at the till so every café guest can access centuries of history. It is the memory of this place that is as vital as its history. The basic purpose of a coffee shop is to be a place where you can have your morning coffee, have a meeting, or stop for breakfast.
Our cafe is divided into three areas:
1. Buffer zone between street and cafe. We consider this part as a town square, that’s why there are no classic seats with tables. Here we placed plywood cubes, benches and tall concrete cylinders for guests to stand around and take a coffee break.
2. The bright hall has large windows, smaller tables and a large wooden table, suitable for those who like long meetings.
3. A dark room with a table and bench for those who wish to sit down and work on their laptops.
Based on the concept of urban aesthetics, we were inspired by the most striking and interesting architectural movement in Belgrade – Brutalism. Architecture, shape and materials became the main tools in the creation of our café space. We redrawn the large shapes of the buildings, reduced their scale and transformed their shapes into interior objects. All materials used in the cafe are construction materials. We used chimney blocks for the base of the benches, paving slabs to frame the bakery counter and coffee area, historical bricks left over from the wall restoration were used in the till area and perforated pallets were used for the electrical work as lights.
In addition to bringing urban architecture into the space, we also wanted to promote the philosophy of the place itself: collaboration and bringing people together, which is the common philosophy of our specialty coffee shop and its attitude towards coffee culture. That’s why we had a ribbon bench running the entire length of the space, creating the feeling that all visitors are sitting on the same line even if they’re at different tables.
The cafe is located in a historic building from 1921, next to the last remaining Belgarde mosque from the Ottoman era. This arrangement determines the context and strategy of the interior design. Therefore, we restored the original appearance of the windows and made them as high as the floor, increasing the amount of light inside the cafe while also restoring the original appearance of the facade.
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