“Mokkado” is a café organized by a 75-year-old pharmaceutical company based in Imizu City Japan, Toyama Prefecture. The café is a renovation of a 100-year-old old house, the birthplace of the founder and also a factory of a Toyama-based company manufacturing and selling medicine in a traditional Toyama style. The company which now mainly handles Chinese herbal medicines along with a variety of healthy food products will operate a café offering chai and shaved ice based on Chinese herbalism along with a corner where medicine can also be purchased.
The interior design is based on 'creating an open and free atmosphere that is easy for anyone to enter', 'carefully dismantle the materials that were originally in the old house and reconstructing them to create the space' and 'drawing out the charm that the old house originally had to the maximum extent possible'. The café offers a cozy environment where people would naturally gather and interact whilst strongly conveying the memories of the land and the story of the building.
A free atmosphere that welcomes the various ways in which guests spend their time and a pleasant spatial experience that connects the inside and outside is generated by creating a doma (space where people can walk with their shoes in a Japanese house typically made with earthen floor) in the center of the building. Steps and benches are added as it takes advantage of the various floor levels created by the doma.
An artwork made from stones and timber found under the floor of the old house with medicinal herb plant is installed in the center of doma to act as a symbol to connect the memory of the old house and the story of the cafe. At the base of the rope partition which envelopes the doma, plants that strive up are planted to allow visitors to visually enjoy the growth of the café and also to provide an opportunity for them to become more aware of their health. The aim of this café is to create a place where the company's concept of a healthy lifestyle, both physically and mentally, could be experienced first-hand.
