‘Customer experience’, ‘waiting experience’ and ‘job satisfaction’ were the base for a casual food bar: a place able to offer added value to the different moments of everyday life; a place able to show the transparency of each process of the final product; a space where the experience of freshness, quality, healthiness, focused on intensive gastronomy and coffee production ‘was directly ‘on stage’ as the performance offered from the Evergreen staff to the customers. The main requirement was to organically integrate all the needs with a high level communication space able to support the performance and to reflect the marketing strategy of the Evergreen brand.

The concept starts from a desire: to let the customer experience to become a ‘total experience’. A space able to expand the customer senses by pushing them to move, to feel forms, shapes and materials.

The EG space, as a ’space performance’ doesn’t offer clear space solution, but just ‘undefined spaces’: multiplicity of semiologies, suggestions and metaphors, height impact materials stimulating communication at different levels. The customer needs to move, to explore, to search solutions, to activate the mind and senses. Evergreen space is not an answer; it s a question, it gives you possibilities, different roads: the role of the customer is active, they have to give their own solution.

On the ground floor, varnished ash wood slats are used with several random tones of green as floor and wall covering, to let the space vibrate between the different possibilities of green. On the same floor, orange and white resin finishes are moving in a fluid growth process where the white folds up to become a part of the bench while the orange folds to become a wall before to turn in the direction of the staircase and the open kitchen. The concept of organic changing, metamorphosis and continuity, relates also the red corian bench: it moves through the space, showing its mass and disappearing into the floor in the direction of the staircase. Up this ‘in progress’ space, two big ‘E’ and ‘G’ shaped volumes float in the space as two balconies; they are made of green PVC stretched film. All the materials like also super mirror finish stainless steel, transparent coloured / fluorescent / radiant Plexiglas, glass and glass mosaics, dionysos marble, are used to expand the ‘waiting experience’ by inducing in the customers the desire to explore, to learn from the ‘multiplicity’ and ‘difference’. more detail architecture-page.

Project details

* Project Name: EverGreen Casual Food Bar
* Location of Site: Athens, Greece
* Design Team: Marco Rucci, Menelaos Koulouris, Nikos Dourdourekas
* Project Type: 24 hours bar, gastronomy, coffe roasting, bakery
* Client: EverGreen, Menelaos Koulouris
* Site Area: 160 sqm
* Built-up Area: 320 sqm on two levels
* Cost of Construction: 400, 000 euro
* Date of completion: April, 2006