‘Tokyo meets Copenhagen’ in timeless Blue Bottle Coffee by Keiji Ashizawa and Norm Architects

Tereza
Cafe
3 months ago

Tokyo-native design studio Keiji Ashizawa and Copenhagen- based Norm Architects teamed up based on mutual admiration and a love for the material richness and timeless appeal to design the latest Blue Bottle Coffee café in Yokohama.

“Adjacent to the park, the Blue Bottle Coffee Café is designed as a glass-walled open space, with soft and welcoming curves in combination with natural wooden surfaces. Keiji Ashizawa is the lead architect and designer of the Blue Bottle Coffee Café in Yokohama, Japan. Together with our team as supporting architects, they partnered with Japan’s leading manufacturer of wooden furniture, Karimoku, on making all the bespoke furniture pieces. Blue Bottle Coffee was founded by James Freeman in Oakland, California, in 2002 with a simple yet revolutionary idea: to serve delicious coffee, roasted fresh and brewed to order, sourced from the finest, most sustainable coffee farms. Today, Blue Bottle is a global network of cafes in the US and Asia. Blue Bottle Coffee are leaders in specialty coffee, driven by obsession for quality and commitment to environmental health. Their belief is simple and their goal unchanged: to connect the world to delicious coffee, because delicious coffee makes life more beautiful. All bespoke furniture pieces within the café draw heavily on the natural references of the surrounding park in an attempt to invite in nature as much as possible – in their design language as well as through their wooden material. By using wood as main material it creates a warm and soft atmosphere. For us there couldn’t be a better partner to team up with than Karimoku, as they uphold a unique quality and approach to the manufacturing of wooden furniture – maintaining a focus on the craftsmanship combined with the latest robotics, making sure that their philosophy of ‘high-tech, high-touch’ is truly embedded in each furniture piece leaving the factory,” explains Frederik Werner, Designer & Partner at Norm Architects