canopy of 28,000 tiles sweeps over yuko nagayama's café in japan

aoi celestie coffee roastery softens urban intersection in japan

A sweeping roof clad in 28,000 blue-gradient tiles, sparkling like ripples in water, gently rests atop the AOI Celestie Coffee Roastery in Japan. Perching the café on a bustling urban corner surrounded by high-rise residences and across from a station, Yuko Nagayama & Associates has anchored a mixed-used complex with a new neighborhood landmark. The structure is set back from the street front with a curve containing a verdant courtyard with an olive grove, forming what the architects describe as a ‘white space’ within the city — symbolically creating a moment of calm and visually softening the engulfing urban density with organic rhythms of light, nature, and material care.

all images by Nobutada Omote

yuko nagayama & associates connects three spatial layers

For Yuko Nagayama & Associates, the project began with a modest brief to activate a public-facing space at the client’s site. With an approach centered on community and enhancing the public sphere, the Japanese practice decided to envelop the everyday ritual of coffee within a spatial and material statement, crafting a volume that feels weightless and grounded. The external courtyard is a sunken yet open enclosure that tops a multi-purpose hall, and at first look subtly reveals the three layers of the AOI Celestie Coffee Roastery.

Inside, the ground level houses the roastery, kitchen, and counter amid concrete and brick curves, while the second opens up to the olive garden through expansive windows. The third floor is semi-enclosed beneath the sweep of the roof, hosting a bar area that peers over the layered volumes below and offers fleeting glimpses of the city. Each level is linked by a central atrium that enhances openness and connectivity.

Yuko Nagayama & Associates completes AOI Celestie Coffee Roastery

28,000 tiles shape the roof rooted in urban memory

The structure is designed as an interplay between enclosure and release. Though the building is compact and hemmed in by tall residential towers, its open courtyard and stepped floorplates allow for porosity and quiet. Along the ground floor window, seats are recessed into the floor itself, inviting the eye outward. Meanwhile, above it all, the tile-clad roof that seems to have fallen from the sky, gives the café its most distinct architectural identity against its neighbors.

This roof, shaped with subtle curves in reinforced concrete, is wrapped in six shades of ceramic blue, produced using the wet extrusion method and coated with glass glaze. The color gradation — lightest at the apex and darkest at the base — gently mirrors the sky and shifts with light, becoming reflective and textured on rainy days as water traces its grooves and drips into the courtyard garden. This was an intentional detail by the team at Yuko Nagayama & Associates, who notes that their use of tiles stems from an observation that at renovation sites, the colors of most materials tend to fade, but tiles retain their original vibrancy.‘We often use tiles because they can retain their original colours over the years, and the tiles and the architecture using them can be passed on to future generations,’ they tell designboom.‘The tiles embody our desire for the Aoi Celestie Coffee Roastery to remain a community landmark for many years to come. The tiles [here] are not meant to recall the past memory; they are a symbol of a succession for the future.’

the curved structure is set back from the streetfront, the void containing a verdant courtyard