[Cafe Camellia] Since the outside of the café is covered with camellia flowers of which the vigorous red is symbolic, we propose the interior should be more calm and stable. Our intention is to withdraw several elements of the nature, characterizing Jeju Island where the climate and the geology are quite different from the main land of Korea. We chose wind, cloud, water, stone, and soil for those elements.
In order to shape ‘wind’, we adopted bamboo split. Thanks to its elastic property, bamboo split makes a beautiful aerodynamic shape, if it is properly hanged. Beautiful three dimensional wave lines on the ceiling could be achieved after many trials by arraying and overlaying a bunch of bamboo splits. The slight difference of each split of bamboos resulted in aesthetically interesting gradation unintentionally.
In order to describe ‘cloud’ which is composing and dispersing, I tried an anodizing method to treat metal surface. I happened to get acquainted with this technology previously and have longed to try it sometime. I applied this in this project, and with the consequence of several trials, we could luckily obtained the fantastically beautiful patterns of the reception table.
In case of ‘stone’, we adopted two different types of stones, one from the mountains and the other from the ocean. Though the compositions are the same, owing to the difference of cooling temperature their shapes and handling properties are different. We used both on the same table with different methods of building-up, one for sleek and one for harsh shape. We also induced a water stream falling on the stone to make dynamic vision and sound. The symbolic wall was prepared with the mixture of regional soil and cinnamon, of which method was traditionally used to prevent insects.