Alona Mountainside Café-Gallery
Location: Alona, Cyprus
Total area: 315 sqm
Design: 2021
Program: Café/Restaurant, Souvenir Shop, Gallery
For this mountainside café / gallery renovation of an existing Modernist building in Alona, Cyprus, we subdivided the spaces onto two primary zones. One for engagement with the view during the day on the ground level and the other as a quiet exploration of art at the lower level of the building. The café restaurant and souvenir shop spaces are extroverted and permeable allowing nature to penetrate its envelope; the gallery spaces are introverted and protected.
The interiors were nature-inspired, filled with judiciously chosen rustic antiques so spare in their lines that they function almost as sculpture. The proposed interiors study the village’s history, adjust within a Modernist architectural context, and bring the story to life with understated elegance and airy aesthetics.
The building’s exterior red-clay brick cladding was preserved, along with its cavernous internal volumes and skylights. We introduced limestone flooring that continues to the exterior and rustic wood cladding for the existing columns, beams and ceiling to add warmth to the double-height main space.
The Alona Mountainside Café / Gallery, serves as a dreamlike world far from the big cities, that envelopes its guests in a calming embrace.
