Cara Mela Bakery / Casa Antillón

Text description provided by the architects. At 20 Trafalgar Street, near Plaza de Olavide, in the Chamberí neighborhood of Madrid, this small specialized pastry shop is located. The architectural project works with two opposing spatial operations that we have called systole and diastole, which face and confront each other. The first space is white, small and contracted, made up of an equipped piece of furniture that receives the visitors and meets all the needs of the clients. This artifact folds and takes multiple forms. It could be said that it is a counter, but it is also a bar, a warehouse, a refrigerator, an oven, a cash register, a shelf, a garbage can, a coffee maker, a grinder, and a sink. This space is so small that it becomes a kind of interior facade that invites and spills into the next room.

Then the surprise appears: the second space -ample- that relaxes and expands. Here color appears to create its own universe of caramelized shapes, furniture that once again unfolds throughout the space, endowing it with various functions, such as an exhibition, a seat, or a table. The forms float in this monochrome space, like sweet brushstrokes that are drawn between the two voids (above and below) of different materiality. Immersed in this sea of green tiles, a red dot captures our attention: the transparent window through which we observe the craftsmanship that our clients do in their daily tasks in the kitchen.

Color and materiality are the main protagonists in the overall composition of the project. Red opens the door to cakes and closes it for us between ovens. The tile connects our spaces. The surface glosses create a visual homogeneity capable of understanding the whole as one, despite the distance of shapes and colors between rooms. Cara Mela is an experiment that suggests a vision of Retail adapted to its current needs: a Take-Away architecture for a hybrid consumption between digitality and the presence.