"A wine shelf that creates gentle spatial boundaries and brings people together."

The project is located in a former Junior High School in a residential area in the neighborhood of Ikejiri, Southwest of Tokyo. The legacy of intervening a space where education used to be the main purpose of its existence had a profound impact in designing not only a wine shop, but a venue where clients can also learn about wine culture.

The given space is a rectangular area of approximately 30 sq. mts. (+/- 4.35 mts width X 6.85 mts of depth) with an entrance through a long corridor connecting the neighboring shops. Exploring diverse spatial configurations we realized that the program could be divided essentially in two spaces; on the one hand a space containing more “public” activities linked to the access and the proper space for the wine shop, and on the other a more “private” area where clients could have more educational activities such as wine catering and degustation.

Instead of using the parallel organization given through the existing concrete walls, we opted for taking advantage of the long axis of the rectangle by twisting the whole project diagonally (Diagram A). This spatial operation was intended to maximize the space as well as to create a progressive spatial experience. A long wine-shelf with a counter was conceived through a grid of 600 mm pitch constructed with a slender steel profile of 30 x 30 mm. By adopting this design strategy we created one first “public” space whose spatial flow opens to the entrance of the shop, and a second “private” space that opens to the educational / managerial area (Diagram B).

Under such scheme we broke the final program in four spaces (Diagram C). The first area serves as an access where people can be received. The second area is the wine shop to the left, allowing the clients to explore through the wine shelves the several wine options that Apéro has to offer along with a high-leveled counter that also connects to the access area. The wine shelves allocated on the left wall of the shop creates a dented shelf that allows each client to experience the bottles with a more intimate approach. A third area on the right of the space is planned for more educative purposes, leaving the finishing on the right wall of the space with black-board painting. The area at the end of the space is planned for working purposes and storage (wine cellar).

Finally the spatial experience of the shop is conceived as a progressive tri-dimensional lattice that serves not only to organize all the shelves and areas of the project but to emphasize a layered spatial depth (Diagram D). While the main wine-shelves are fixed furniture (passive), the design also considered some other non-fixed elements (active) that can support the flexible usage of the shop when other events requests so (Diagram D).