As in any major city across the planet, coffee culture has rooted firmly in Shanghai‘s urban fabric, featuring an increasing number of design-led coffee parlours which cater to various different demographics. The newly opened page café, designed by its barista owner and local architecture practice STUDIO 4/301, is concepted as a community coffee shop. Occupying a 20 sqm. (215 sq.ft.) ground floor unit, the café may be design-led, but it’s void of any pretence, focusing instead on functionality, connecting with local coffee aficionados, and obviously, its coffee concoctions. It was decided to move the shop boundary somewhat back from the street to better embed the building into the surrounding streetscape. The façade comprises six floor-to-ceiling glass sliding doors, allowing the indoor space to fully open up when weather permits.
Interestingly, the floor of page café is paved with the same outdoor pavement bricks, creating a seamless connection with the outdoor streetscape, and as such, signalling easy access. Despite page‘s compact dimensions, a sizeable elongated service counter, crafted from basswood plywood, stainless steel plates and featuring a dark grey metal plate as tabletop, has been installed. The presence of this volume underpins the café’s concept, turning coffee making into a performance with the local community as its audience. Echoing the name of the café and its eponymous coffee brand, the side of the plywood is kept untreated. Therefore, the multi-layers of wood sheets and metal plates are composed as if they were pages of a book. The other fixtures also follow this design language and expose the untreated side of the plywood. The menu of page lists a variety of coffee concoctions made from various blends. © superfuture
page
495 Shaanxi Bei Lu (Jing’an)
200040 Shanghai
Tue-Sun 10am-7pm
Publishers Note
Just to be clear – superfuture® is a design blog and not a political commentator. No surprise there. The scope of our content has always been global and borderless, however that can often mean covering projects in countries where we will not agree with the politics or actions of those countries. In a world that’s as screwed up as ever right now, the focus of our support is to those designers, architects and other creatives who aim to make the world a more liveable one – as opposed to people that try their hardest to destroy it. So if a project hits our desk and we like it based on its design credentials, we may choose to publish regardless of its location or creators nationality. superfuture® has always been inclusive and hopes for all current wars, aggression, violence, hate and extremism to end.
