Caf Smallhours, started as an online cookie shop, has finally opened. The project brief was to renovate the existing house and create an extension for the home-made cookie shop.

An inner courtyard was placed between the house and the shop in order to give some breath to the quite compact site. However, instead of rigid, conventional grid plan, we distorted the courtyard to create a flow of vision and space. Along with the owners’s requested use of bricks and stone, we proposed cast-in-place exposed concrete structure to bring together the materiality. The front of the shop does not have large voids in order to avoid visual and noise pollution from the street and also to block away the strong sunlight. At the same time, it hides the heart of the project - the inner courtyard filled with light and greenery.