Araku Coffee
Bangalore, India | 2021
Planting of the newly opened café, “Araku Coffee” was a fun project that pushed us out of our comfort zone of outdoor tropical gardens to an indoor air-conditioned space. (www.arakucoffee.in)
The café in Bangalore, is the flagship store of the Araku brand in India. It is a beautifully designed glass encased space of 6000 sq ft brought to life by world famous architects from New York and India. It serves world class coffee produced in the collaboration of tribal families with renowned international coffee experts, all catalyzed by the Naandi Foundation.
Our brief was to design a flora for the space so as to speak cuisine, nutrition, culture, health and ofcourse coffee. We drew inspiration from the coffee plantations and landscape of the the Araku valley and strived to bring that feeling into the café. We designed large coffee bushes in big planters in the centre of both the floors. These are easy conversation starters in a café and their flowering and fruiting is an event that momentarily connects us to the outside world.
Around these bushes we curated a very diverse and interesting community of plants, especially choosing those with connections to the Araku valley. Healthy soils and a vibrant biodiverse ecosystem are prerequisites for world class coffee. We wanted to emphasis this using a very high diversity of plants surrounding the coffee bushes, a reminder that all that surrounding ecosystem supports the coffee to help it bloom and flourish.
