Fatface coffee Pop-up shop, designed by BAICAI, is a month-long event at the WINDOW Gallery space. Born in the city of Shenyang, Fatface coffee is a local cafe representative of the niche culture. The brand values the quality of coffee, the power of concept and a positively rebellious attitude. Harboring a unique understanding of the regional coffee culture, our design incorporates these branding values into the interiority of the Pop-up shop. 

Shenyang is a city beaming with a love for beer. The city’s fondness for beer is expressed in its popularity across the streets and its ever-presence in the daily converse of the residents. How can the coffee culture respond to the city’s attachment to beer? This Pop-up shop aspires to explore the energizing dynamics between the two seemingly opposite cultures through designing installations and creating symbols. Our design intention aims to create a symbolic space to celebrate cultures with grass-root and common-place components. Spelling out industrial charm while attending budget control and time efficiency, we choose modular beer case as the unit pixel to compose all the furniture pieces in the cafe. We design customized plates to be combined with the unique tectonics of beer cases. 

The strategy explores the endless possibilities of what a beer case could be: a bar counter, seating of various heights, an exhibition stage, or a screen to hide the frameworks for water and electricity. The project experiments with the confluence between beer and coffee, bridging meaningful dialogues between what is local and what is imported. The design utilizes 300 beer cases to create a bar counter at the center of the Pop-up shop. The monumental scale of the bar counter forms the pivot of the space, engaging visitors in an immersive and interactive experience. The transparency of the glass countertop further channels the purity through sensitive material choice. 

Switching the position between coffee makers and guests, the design revolutionizes the conventional café floor plan. Instead of short-cutting communications among guests, the strategy frees the window to be the view and articulates the directionality of space, thus transforming the cafe into a gallery itself. 

For Fatface Coffee Pop-up shop, the design of space is both eclectic and accurate. An open-ended space for discussion.