Book cafe KANTAKA / 図書喫茶カンタカ

It is located in the suburbs, far from the hustle and bustle of the city center, facing the main road
in a quiet residential area with fields, rivers, and woods nearby.
The existing typical roadside restaurant-style building has been completely renovated into a book cafe. The client is involved in the preservation activities of the local woods and river.
Before starting the design, the following were told from him.
■To create a place where people can live in harmony with nature and create a sustainable lifestyle, relating the woods (Zoukibayashi*) to agriculture and food.
*Zouibayashi is the Japanese word for human-made woods that is not a natural forest, but close to people’s daily lives and has been maintained and utilized through human care and It used to be the original landscape of this region but now the relationship between humans and woods has collapsed.
■To create a place where people, from children to the elderly, can feel at home, especially children in order to achieve a sustainable society and community.
■To make use of the owned 40,000 books to create a library where people can feel and think about nature and important things we want to preserve.
■To create a place that provides opportunities to experience food, greenery, culture, and art.

In order to understand the client’s thoughts, the designer walked through the woods and the riverside and had been thinking about how to express the client’s thoughts in a concrete form. Not only create a friendly place with plenty of wood but also expressing Zoukibayashi in the space and including the inspiration of the river somewhere were requested. Finding the answers to these requests was an enjoyable challenge for the designer.