Tea Gathering Center “Mountain Tea Pavilion” Series

The théATRE Tea Pavilions, or "Mountain Dwelling Tea Hut" series, is a project by koooo architects (), with a team including Shinya Kojima, Ayaka Kojima, Kotaro Kitakami and Xueying Xiong. théATRE is a modern lifestyle brand that links tea, food and art through drinking, eating and cake experiences. The series is placed in the third-floor atrium of Sanlitun West in Beijing and along the street in Sanlitun South, intended to make hurried passers-by pause at an "urban teahouse". The concept derives from the tea house itself: the interior is the source for tea and tea-paired pastries, while a solid-wood monolithic counter at the window is opened outward as the interface where the barista meets the customer. Rejecting conventional rectangular shop units, the design occupies ambiguous atriums, plazas and streets, and solves the uncertainty of these sites through a single architectural symbol. The pitched roof and windows are unified, and the bar counter - the zone of closest contact - becomes the dividing line of the roof, inverting the traditional proportion so that roof height exceeds wall height, producing a distinctive bluntness that blurs the horizontal break between eave and wall. Materials are deliberately plain: custom diamond-shaped metal tiles, factory-made and bendable, form the roof skin and negotiate the curved surfaces, natural diatomaceous earth covers interior and some exterior walls for a rough, honest texture, and solid-wood slabs with natural edges form the window counters and the sheltering eaves. From a sustainability standpoint, every pavilion is fully demountable: the structure is broken into transportable units that clip together, and all interior and exterior finishes and props are modularised to the same unit size, fully assembled in the factory, then disassembled, shipped and reassembled on site. The series is a community-scale, light-format experiment that scatters small tea-culture base stations across the city.