Architecture studio Schemata Architects has created Blue Bottle Coffee Toyosu Park Cafe, a wooden cafe in Japan with an open design that gives visitors an unobstructed view of the sea.

The wooden building comprises three volumes with sloping roofs of different heights and was designed to blend in with the trees in Toyosu Park, Tokyo, which sits next to Tokyo Bay.

The cafe is located in Tokyo’s Toyosu Park

“Because of the park’s good location, the aim was to create a relationship in which the entire park would feel like a seating area from the point of view of the cafe side, and the cafe is one of the diverse places to be from the point of view of the park side,” Schemata Architects founder Jo Nagasaka told Dezeen.

“Not to diminish the good qualities of the park by the construction of the building, the entire building was created as a cluster of human-scale volumes,” he added.

Schemata Architects used mainly wood for its structure

Schemata Architects designed the cafe for Blue Bottle Coffee as a “gradation of outdoor, semi-outdoor and indoor activities” that can be accessed from all sides of the building.

To further blur the indoors and outdoors, the studio used bricks both inside and outside the 300-square-metre eatery.

“Instead of a clear separation between inside and outside, we wanted to create a pleasant experience with gradational connections between indoor, semi-outdoor and outdoor areas, so we used bricks on the floor and counters as a motif to connect inside and outside,” Nagasaka explained.

Wooden pillars create outdoor “rooms” with FRP tables

Blue Bottle Coffee Toyosu Park Cafe’s overall structure is made from two types of wood, which form decorative pillars supporting roofs that vary in height to give the building a dynamic feel.

The pillars also create “rooms” that enclose cafe spaces while being open to nature.

“The tree species used are cypress (hinoki) and larch,” Nagsaka said. “The safety engineering construction method using laminated wood allows column spans to be skipped and seating to be arranged freely.”

“The eye-level areas use glass extensively to allow unobstructed sea views through the building,” the studio added.

Red brick was used both inside and outside

The facade of Blue Bottle Coffee Toyosu Park Cafe is covered in beige-hued fibre-reinforced polymer (FRP), which also forms small tabletops that either sit on steel legs or are attached to the wooden pillars of the cafe.

Schemata Architects chose to use this FRP to create a coherent colour palette for the cafe, where the brown hue of the natural wood is enhanced by red tables and chairs that match the red brick.

The cafe’s roofs have different heights

“The use of FRP in the same beige as the wood reduces the overall number of colours,” Nagasaka explained. “The transparency of the material also gives the furniture a light impression.”

Other recent Schemata Architect projects that make extensive use of wood include a collection of low-lying angular guesthouses in Okinawa and a sweet shop in Funamachi, Japan.

The photography is by Takumi Ota.

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