Karnaros Bakery & Patisserie

The project concerns the redesign of the storefront of Karnaros Bakery & Patisserie in Krestena Helias, Greece, designed by Studio Arche ( www.archelab.gr ).
This is a family bakery & patisserie, located in a small town of western Greece and runs for 3 generations. The company had just renovated their production line and the scope of the project was to redesign their storefront that illustrated this significant change in the company history. The main request from the clients was to create a space that on one hand is both new and familiar and on the other hand to visually signify the dual identity of bakery and patisserie. Based on these, the design direction responded to four opposing pairs:

Pair one is the curved and orthogonal: The inner curvilinear “skin” which is applied on the wall-floor surface is composed with the austere and orthogonal geometry of the displays and the furniture design.

Pair Two is the intricate and the subtle: The natural and rich texture of the birch is combined with the pure and subtle texture of the Corian and the marble texture. The former abstractly relates to the texture of the bread and the latter to the one of the cream.

Pair Three is the saturated and the pure: The color saturation of the upper part with the color neutrality of the lower part of the space. The upper to intensify the identity and the lower to provide a monochromatic canvas for the display of the colorful products.

Pair Four is the function and the identity: A special element that was taken into consideration was the existence of a pillar in the middle of the available space, which was rendered as a functional flow problem. Instead of hiding this “necessary problem”, the proposal intensifies its presence, setting it as the core of the geometric deformation. Thus it converts this element from a functional problem into a singular identity element of the space.

The protagonist inner surface of wall/ceiling is designed as a gradually - deforming continuous surface which is constructed as a sequence of composite plywood panels. The shape of each sheets derives from the sectioning of the continuous surface that has its maximum deformation in the central column and covers the ceiling and the opposing wall. The surface consists of 59 section profiles with a total of 312 pieces of plywood. Each section profile is composed by a number of plywood pieces that are connected using the traditional method of stud shear connectors and wood glue. Each profile is suspended by L shaped steel brackets.

The fabrication of the inner skin involved methods that are both contemporary and traditional. The skin was designed as a continuous surface that occupies the ceiling and the back wall. This surface has its maximum deformation at the location of the column that exists in the centre of the floor plan. At that location the inner skin bends so it reaches the floor. The result is a continuous surface characterized by gradual deformation. A series of 59 section profiles was created with a gap of 18 cm. Each profile composes a custom panel that was fabricated with birch plywood sheets of 21 mm thickness. The pieces were cnc cut and assembled on site using traditional methods of wood connection. Each panel was suspended with L shape steel brackets at their specific location.

Project: Karnaros Bakery & Patisserie
Architecture firm: ARCHE - Architecture & Design Lab
Architectural Design: Vasilis Stroumpakos, Mina Sarantopoulou
Website: www.archelab.gr

Collaborators
Light Design: Yorgos Konstantinidis
Photography: Christos Dionysopoulos