Yuji Tanabe Architects

Organic Box is an organic cafe facing the Atami Ginza shopping street that leads to the sea in Atami City, Shizuoka, Japan. The town of Atami has long been famous for its hot springs. The existing store with a frontage of about 5m is a pharmacy whose roots are the booth shop (which camelia oil for hair and white powder for face) that the Atami’s GEISHA went to there. This time, about 1/4 (frontage 2.5mx depth 5m) was renovated into an organic cafe. Mainly take-away sales facing the street, but there are various seats such as counter seats at the back of the kitchen, table seats, and a long counter using a wooden frame in the longitudinal direction. People can feel the light and atmosphere of each other by using frosted glass to partition the pharmacy. In addition, this glass creates a space for product shelves on the pharmacy side and a counter space on the café side by swinging the vertical angle of each 18cm wide crosspiece. Glasses with different angles, as well as the reflected light from the cafe lights, can be seen through various colored cosmetic signs on the pharmacy side, and the lights of the cars and arcades on the street intersect. Although it is a single-layer partition, it creates a complex spread with multiple layers like fog. In order to keep costs down, the ceiling was left untouched. Therefore, in order to use existing air conditioners and lighting, the upper part of the partition wall is a wire mesh. Lighting hoods and cloudy shelves hung on the walls of the kitchen are by the sculptor/Kentaro Okada, giving the space an impressive shadow from the lines. The walls of the kitchen are covered with aluminum, and two eyeballs are installed on the street side to participate in the bustling shopping street.