Blue Mountain Cafe

At Blue Mountain Café and Bar's Gudun branch, located on the third floor of a home-improvement mall in Hangzhou, Shegu Space Design has built an experimental chamber of surreal fantasy. Shoppers arrive exhausted after wandering endless building-material showrooms, their heads full of conventional interiors; the designers wanted a 180-degree frequency shift into a dreamlike world. The reference is Alejandro Jodorowsky's never-filmed adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune—the cult director's abandoned epic, documented in Jodorowsky's Dune. Design lead Xie Yinqiu is captivated by that unrealized blueprint and wants to inject, between the steel and concrete walls of the city, a future imagination: a transition from the real world into another dimension, toward a spiritual dune of art and psychedelia. He constructs a pure field of spirit in which color and element become different energy fields, so that visitors temporarily withdraw from reality and, through looking, touching and sipping, immerse gradually into another plane. Marrying Caraveggia's desert monument in the Israeli Negev—where the sculpture splits the endless expanse and triggers emotion—the design works through basic constants: circle, square, triangle, set into the most ethereal of emotional ideas. A triangle pierces the ceiling, asking where the boundary goes; a circle is split open, and a bottomless red spreads, seeping from the eye into emotion; the square becomes seat, column, screen or monument. Light is everywhere, sometimes soft, sometimes powerful, and the space, originally an ordinary container, becomes expression when fed only by O, square and triangle and by intangible feeling. The 450-square-meter interior on Gutun Road near Tianhong Street leaves the initial definition to the creator and the rest to the visitor.