Kiev’s Pink Cafe, an Oasis of Japanese Desserts

Amai hana is Japanese for ‘sweet flower’. It’s also the name of a café in Kiev which specialises in Japanese desserts, and where the design lives up to this name. The Ukranian design duo behind it, Z. River Studio, was not put off by the relatively small surface area (52m²), and made it its mission to create a space that’s washed in pink from floor to ceiling.

For the furniture, they stuck to the essentials: the chairs and tables, which are transparent or pale pink, act as an extension of the walls, with the exception of a pair of Cala armchairs by Kettal in a contrasting red. To create this space, they used a colour palette ranging from powder pink to terracotta, and focused particularly on texture: as you look up towards the ceiling, you notice natural materials which have been worked in a complex manner. The shiny PVC floor thus gives way to wooden dowels which cover the wall.

These dowels cover the whole ceiling, too. There are over 4000 of them, placed in an irregular arrangement and varying in length (they measure between 15 and 35 cm). A contained chaos, the designers explain, created to evoke ‘the chaotic and rhythmic nature of a bamboo grove’.