Café Cardington occupies a very small, old building in Chengdu that once housed a street hairdresser. The design takes a cave as its reference, handled with a clean and minimal approach.
Heavily textured, sand-coloured wall paint and softly curved corners make the whole interior cosy and comfortable — full of little nooks to settle into. The original roof was kept, giving the ceiling a distinctive character that composes perfectly with the rest.
In counterpoint to those gentle edges, the main entrance, a wall mirror and the openings left by old doors are deliberately rough — imitating broken walls, a coarse foil to the softness elsewhere.
