NOUS Restaurant + Flower Shop in Guangdong, China by 0321 STUDIO.

Nous opened it’s first pioneering experimental floral restaurant in Doncheng District in Dongguan earlier this year, offering mixed services of exploring the aesthetics of ingredients and floral matching. Shenzhen-based creative agency 0321 STUDIO collaborated with Nous to organise and design the shop along the street. The client brief focused on resolving the relationship between floral and dining offering in visual, functional and emotional ways.

“We believe that the importance of space is the relationship, connections between people and space, between space and space, and between emotion and environment,” said the design team. They choose a single material to maximise its contact with space –terrazzo– but with a twist, differentiating it from the conventional material. “Emphasizing the randomness of the white aggregates and enlarging their size, forming a special material mechanism, and creating an extreme visual experience over a large area attempt to influence the customer’s emotions and create a unique dining experience,” explains 0321 STUDIO.

The design concept deliberately hides the restaurant function from the outside. Along the street, the visual signals of the restaurant are completely hidden behind the floral function. The flower shop is not affiliated with the dining area, but rather acts as a transition between the restaurant and the public domain of the street.

“We choose a relatively large-scale appearance of transparent coloured glass, as the boundary between the store and the outside world, and combine flower display, floral operation, storage and other functions to create a full metal mass,” said the designers.

Long cast-in-situ terrazzo seats, combined with fur blankets and simple metal components creates a neat seating layout. The pink staircase acts as a ‘decorative element’ as well as the ‘vertical traffic tool’.

[Images courtesy of 0321 STUDIO. Photography by Meat Mountain.]