Gallery

Description

Tokyo Baby Café is a parents and children café at Tokyo's neighbourhood of Omotesando, a concept coffee shop were parents can enjoy being out with small children without worrying about those around them. Beyond being fully stocked with children’s books and toys, the cafe includes a playroom, private rooms and separate spaces for nursing and changing diapers. Wide aisles make it easy to move around with a stroller, and light switches and door handles are placed high up to keep children from using them.

The cafe was designed to be enjoyed by two very different sizes of users, adults and small children; in consequence, the interior displays this difference in scale. Besides scale, children and adults see the world through different eyes. Taking a table as an example, adults live their lives aware of tabletops, and the things placed on top of them, but children see the table's underside: table's legs can look like pillars, and the reverse of the tabletop is like a roof. The cafe's “absolutely huge” and “absolutely tiny” furnishings take advantage of these two perspectives. A nursing sofa becomes a playroom when blown up on a massive scale.

Big windows pair with small ones, and large light bulbs with small ones. The floorboards vary in size, and the undersides of tables, where parents eyes don't reach, hide pictures of parent and baby animals.

Biography

Giving people a small " ! " moment.
There are so many small " ! " moments hidden in our everyday.
But we don’t recognize them.
And even when we do recognize them, we tend to unconsciously reset our minds and forget what we’ve seen.
But we believe these small " ! " moments are what make our days so interesting, so rich.
That’s why we want to reconstitute the everyday by collecting and reshaping them into something that’s easy to understand.
We’d like the people who’ve encountered nendo’s designs to feel these small " ! " moments intuitively.
That’s nendo’s job.