Tato Architects / Yo Shimada

PAPABUBBLE / SNOW PICNIC Osaka Semba

Location／Chuo-ku, Osaka, Japan
Principal use／Confectionery shop

Architects

Tato Architects / Yo Shimada
In charge／Yo Shimada, Yasue Imai

Structural engineers

tmsd Takashi Manda Structural Design Office

Contractor

And S

Fixture fabrication

Hashizume Kousakusho

Kitchen equipment

Tanico

Size

Total floor area　143.6 m²

Overlapping to Divide

The site is close to Honmachi, the commercial heart of Osaka, on a block held between Midosuji and Sakaisuji. One street in from the glamour of Midosuji, where the flow of people quiets down a little, stands a building combining offices and apartments; the shop occupies its ground floor.

PAPABUBBLE, a shop specializing in art candy, and SNOW PICNIC, a café the company is newly developing. How to fuse — and at the same time separate — a store with these two faces was the crux of the design. The hands pulling and folding the candy, the gestures of brewing coffee, gelato being made with liquid nitrogen: our first concern was that the movements of the artisans should be seen at their most appealing. The counter where the art candy is handed over is clad in rough, unrefined lava stone; the counter where the liquid-nitrogen ice cream is made, in translucent tiles sourced from Heath Ceramics; the SNOW PICNIC counter is solid timber, with a wall of Oya stone cut into geometric patterns behind it. Having given each its own material character, we enclosed them all within frames of brass and black-scale steel. The frames raise each territory as its own, and by overlapping one another they leave the sightlines open, so that from the street the artisans come into view as a single continuous scene.

For PAPABUBBLE this is the flagship store for western Japan, and its principal workshop as well. Seeking a charm in which refinement and roughness are mixed together, we layered over those stones and tiles a further set of materials: brass and black-scale steel, hooks made from bar clamps, unfinished solid oak flooring, lauan plywood. By setting side by side materials that differ in both texture and status, we have tried to produce that complex appeal.

The existing building is a contemporary curtain wall, and how to give the shop a face there was a difficult question. In the end, by overlapping frames just as we had inside, we were able to raise a new façade while satisfying legal requirements such as those governing the smoke-vent windows. Just within it, new wooden doors were made and painted in off-white and black, each conveying the atmosphere of its respective shop.