Although it’s perfectly real—you can touch it, walk through it, observe it, and, most interestingly, feel it—the interior design of the Mocha Pune Cafe and Bar seems like something out of fiction. And not only because it’s inspired by those legendary mines that J.R.R. Tolkien imagined in The Lord of the Rings, or, as its architects put it, it evokes “the raw, monolithic grandeur of ancient quarries and the sculpted cave dwellings of the dwarves of Moria.” It doesn’t just seem fictional because of this inspiration, we say, but because it doesn’t pretend to be real, it doesn’t aspire to immerse guests in the dampness of caves carved from reality. Rather, it’s about introducing visitors to a “non-existent” place, which consequently appeals to the imagination.
The interior design of the Mocha Pune Cafe and Bar is the work of Loop Design Studio for the Indian coffee chain, “known not just for its menu, but the varied experiences it brought to 20 outlets in 18 cities.” In this case, the experience is found in its Pune franchise. “Dominated by enormous layered columns and cantilevered volumetric forms, the design creates an immersive spatial experience,” say its architects and designers.
Once again, we find ourselves facing an example of that current trend according to which the experience of the visitor, the user, the diner, the adventurer, the tourist, and the local is an end in itself. If we’ve already talked about experience-hotels and experience-restaurants, now, with the Mocha Pune Cafe and Bar, we enter the fantastical realm of experience-cafes.
To the “colossal, seemingly carved volumes,” to the “textured surfaces,” to the “stratigraphic language,” is added a “play of light and shadow” that underlines the “tectonic quality of the space.” This is how the interior design of the Mocha Cafe and Bar achieves a spatial contradiction: the “steep and lithic” setting is simultaneously overwhelming and intimate, evoking a kind of immensity while maintaining a sense of refuge, “appearing both primal and contemporary,” mythical and everyday, rough and delicate, astonishing and ordinary… In short, fictional and real. In a word, paradoxical.
Sources: Loop Design Studio, Mocha Pune Cafe and Bar.
Images: Pruneshdev vía Loop Studio Design.
