Design Details: The Wood Panels of Boobun Pocket Café in Thailand

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Welcome to Design Details, an ongoing editorial feature in Daily Coffee News focused on individual examples of coffee shop architecture, interior design, packaging design or branding. If you are a coffee shop owner, designer or architect and would like to submit your project for consideration, reach our editors here.

Project: Boobun Pocket Café (Facebook)
Location: Nakhon Sawan, Thailand (Google Maps link)
Architect/Design Firm: CUP Scale Studio (Instagram)
Lead Architect: Santi Aramwibul
Size (interior): 40 square meters (430 square feet)
Opened: 2022
Photographs: Chamaiphorn Lamaiphan & Santi Aramwibul

In a central district in Nakhon Sawan, Thailand, sits the Boobun Pocket Cafe, a compact, vertically oriented bakery and coffee bar surrounded by hardwood paneling.

In a statement shared with DCN, project design firm CUP Scale Studio said the wood elements throughout the structure clearly reference historic Thai design vernacular for residential and rural buildings, such as barns. 

The project involved the reuse of wood cut to various sizes, including wood panels on the exterior and interlocking wooden platforms that form counters and seating areas on the upper floors.

Flanked by two private buildings, the Boobun cafe rises from within a 10-by-10-meter plot with open air on the first floor. Paneling on the raised levels is designed to maintain privacy.

The facade includes curved corners and clerestory windows in the upper areas, which are supported by beams rising up through the ground level’s raised floor.

Cup Scale Studio told DCN that wood used throughout the structure was reclaimed from previous uses, both for efficiency and to maintain cultural heritage.

“Wood becomes stronger with less moisture in it,” the firm stated. “This is part of sustainable architecture through material efficiency.”

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