Area: 6200ft²
The site: Festival Walk, Kowloon Tong
Client: Maxim's Group

This simplylife Bakery Café offers a combination of intimate dining space and laid-back garden terrace within an urban shopping mall. To showcase the crafts of bakery and gourmet cooking, a simple open plan is adopted for the entire outlet. Using light bluish grey, dark chocolate and off white furnishings, a sensual palette of tones balances the causal and formal atmosphere well which would suit all dining occasions.

At the entrance, guests first encounter the baking room enclosed by a waist-to-ceiling glass window, overseeing a Calacatta marble worktop while bakers are performing busy crafts of cake-making. A retail area is set behind the baking room, characterized by a collection of traditional European cabinetry details using the brand signature bluish grey colour with a modern twist. The dining area is carved into two spatial experiences. Banquet seating and tables are arranged around an open-plan kitchen, where true culinary preparation is conjoined within. The space confronts and engages the senses of smell, taste, sound and space. Walls are installed with full-height dark chocolate brown wood panels and cabinets with refined moulding details. Banquette seating is designed deliberately low and deep for laid-back comfort. At the kitchen work stations, the counter has a Calacatta marble top and dark chocolate brown wood cabinets which give a classic traditional appearance. The overall atmosphere is perfected by the addition of oak flooring.

In contrast, the garden terrace is a casual dining area paved entirely with tiles in jumbled colours. It offers a vast open space overlooking the ice-skating arena of the shopping mall two storeys below. Furnished with woven chairs, parasols, natural plants and hanging flower pots, the garden terrace evokes the dining experience of a street side European café.