A 3.3 m² Tokyo parking spot becomes a living lab for a Seoul café’s rebirth, merging architecture and coffee culture in Jo Nagasaka + Schemata Architects's experimental micro-intervention.
Tucked into the pared-back, post-industrial fabric of Tokyo's Sendagaya neighborhood, Bohumil sendagaya is less a café than a living prototype. This ephemeral outpost of Seoul’s Bohumil Coffee—helmed by Mr. Kim, founder of the cult-favorite Anthracite—occupies a 3.3 m² parking space at the edge of Schemata Architects’ own office. Designed by Jo Nagasaka in collaboration with his firm, this micro-intervention distills the ethos of "fourth-wave" coffee culture: anti-gentrification, hyper-local, and profoundly iterative.
The architectural gesture is modest but charged with intent. Instead of erecting a flagship with monolithic permanence, Nagasaka offers a durational study, a work-in-progress that is continuously reconfigured. Bohumil sendagaya operates as a full-service café while doubling as a 1:1 scale laboratory for the eventual Seoul site. Each detail—from the spatial choreography of the counter to the rhythm of planters and signage—is tweaked, lived with, and re-evaluated in real time. It is design not as spectacle, but as quiet choreography, unfolding slowly in the margins.
This approach resonates with Schemata’s broader practice: subtle, surgical interventions that preserve the patina of place while unlocking new potentials within old bones. The former warehouse turned architecture office becomes an incubator not just for buildings, but for ways of being. In a city obsessed with newness, Bohumil sendagaya offers an alternative—design as dialogue, where experimentation and ephemerality are the point, not the problem.
Nagasaka’s Tokyo project reminds us that architecture can be provisional without being temporary, and that hospitality might thrive not in glossy temples of consumption, but in spaces of shared risk, process, and care.
