Location: Durban, South Africa

This project involved transforming an old and obsolete industrial ‘boiler room’ structure  into a restaurant café. The café is located  in the centre of Durban’s old Lion Match Factory complex which has been renovated and repurposed into an office park.

Only the bare bones of the original boiler room structure had survived. There was a missing wall on one side, and the roof was missing with just the old steel roof trusses and purlins exposed to the sky.

Nevertheless the space defined within the centre of that simple skeleton had beautiful proportions and a magnificent volume.

Thus the challenge was to maintain the feeling of openness and volume, and the raw beauty of the existing structure, without adding too much to it that could detract from these existing qualities.

Instead of re-building the missing wall on the western edge, the space is enclosed at night by two gigantic 6 meter high pivoting screens. When opened these timber and steel screens form horizontal pergolas, which shade the tables below on the terrace.

Rather than the convention of a white ceiling placed below the roof structure, plywood boards were placed between the steel roof purlins in order to express all of the existing roof structure, celebrate the existing volume, and create natural warmth to contrast against an otherwise grey industrial colour pallet.

Three large old industrial steel windows that were removed from elsewhere in the original factory complex during the renovations, were re-used to enclose some other existing openings whilst maintaining the industrial aesthetic.