Yellow Cafe

What you are looking at

Yellow Cafe is a design study and was not built. The four views cover one room: a counter, a communal table and two-tops along a window.

The counter front is matte black with a gold script wordmark. Behind it is a mustard recess framed in black. Inside are a dark menu board in white and gold and open timber shelves of retail bags. A grid of small square cubbies holds jars in pink, red, yellow and orange. From across the room, it reads as a block of colour, not as stock.

The seating is arranged three ways in one room. Round two-tops in pale timber sit on black pedestals near the door. A long communal table with black steel legs runs down the middle. A line of two-tops sits against a caramel banquette, under a full-height window in black frames. Overhead, clear glass globe pendants hang on black cords at varied drops with warm filament bulbs. The back wall carries concentric painted arcs in ochre, cream, brown and grey. A large green leaf motif sits over them. The floor is polished grey terrazzo.

The moves

A café this size lives or dies on how many ways it can be occupied. Three table types in one room is a plan decision, not a styling one. The two-tops suit a single customer with a laptop. The communal table suits a group, or four strangers. The banquette line takes the window and the daylight, the seat people ask for first.

Colour is used as wayfinding. The menu board, the jars and the wordmark sit inside one lit yellow recess against black. That is everything a customer needs to see. Everything else is ochre, pale timber and terrazzo. From the door, the counter is the brightest thing in the room. The queue forms where it should.

The painted arch is the room's only ornament, and it is flat. That keeps it inexpensive and keeps it clear of the tables. It also gives the back wall a centre. The long communal table then has something to end at, instead of running into a blank wall.

Why we design this way

We plan a commercial room the way we plan a home. Daylight and how a person moves through it are settled first. Finish comes after. Terrazzo, timber and paint are here because they take wear in a room scrubbed every night. They are not here because they photograph well. A study like this one is where the seat count and the atmosphere get argued out. That happens before a fit-out budget exists. The same approach runs through our office and commercial interiors.

Every Aalekh project is drawn, visualised in 3D and reviewed by Ar. Pooja Kothari before fit-out begins. See the rest of our commercial work, or read about commercial architecture in Bangalore.