Gallery GIF: A Former Café Stripped to Its Shell and Rebuilt as a Showroom That Never Stops Changing

Most showrooms are built to sell one thing well. Gallery GIF is built to stay unfinished on purpose. It takes a neutral container, sets loose, brightly coloured objects inside it, and lets the room keep changing as brands, exhibitions and events come and go. The architecture holds back so the contents can speak, and that restraint is the project's sharpest decision.

Designed by Сергей Питерский, the project received a Jury Commendation in Interiors ‘20. The brief turned a former café into a multi-brand exhibition environment that works as a retail platform, a cultural venue and a point of contact with the community, all at once. The budget was tight and so was the schedule. Decisions were made quickly and carried out in parallel, closer to a design-build process than a linear sequence of drawings followed by construction.

A Café Erased Down to Concrete, Then Left Open in the Middle

The first move was subtraction. Floors, ceilings, walls and outdated services were all dismantled until only the structural shell remained. The opening view shows the result: raw concrete, an arched window and track lighting overhead, with green and magenta steel frames and white wire-mesh cages standing in the room like props waiting for a performance. Nothing is fixed to the centre of the floor, and that is deliberate. The client wanted a space that could keep evolving without structural work, so the middle stays clear for presentations, lectures, masterclasses and temporary installations.

The close-up of the mesh cages on grey concrete explains the logic at a smaller scale. These are lightweight, open frames that hold products without walling them in, and they can be moved by hand. The demolition was more than a cleanup. It reset the room to a neutral base on which a new identity could be assembled from scratch.

Colour Belongs to the Stands, Not to the Walls

Around the perimeter, custom metal exhibition stands are each tailored to a specific brand. Here a green steel frame and a magenta outline sit against bare concrete beside a mesh shelf and a mirrored counter. The envelope stays monochrome while each stand carries its own vivid hue, so every display reads as an independent object rather than part of a decorated wall. This division of labour is what keeps the space usable over time. The room does not age with a brand's palette because it never adopts one, and when a tenant leaves, its colour leaves with it.

Furniture That Stores, Seats and Defines the Room

Seating does more than one job here. The project describes a soft pedestal seating system with concealed storage, and this brushed steel alcove shows the idea in practice: a grey cushioned bench sitting over white drawers, with a wall-mounted speaker and a ceiling light panel built into the same recess. In a showroom that hosts events as often as it displays goods, storage has to disappear when an audience arrives. Folding it into the seating turns the furniture into active architecture that can absorb whatever the next use requires.

Concrete, Plaster and Metal as a Deliberately Quiet Backdrop

An orange steel shelving unit with glass shelves stands against bare concrete, and the wall socket beside it is left in plain view. That small detail says a lot about the project's honesty. The palette is limited to concrete, plaster and metal, an industrial base that cuts visual noise and makes temporary exhibits easier to read. The minimalism is practical as well as stylistic. Fewer materials and fewer construction layers meant savings in cost and time, which mattered on a compressed schedule. Because the stands are modular, a unit like this can be reconfigured or reassigned instead of being thrown away.

Steel Niches, Arched Openings and Light That Can Be Re-Aimed

The steel-clad niches are where the design gets most atmospheric. Brushed panels wrap two arched openings, a black cushioned bench with white drawers sits beneath them, and the exposed concrete ceiling stays visible above. In the second view, the arches frame the brick facade outside and draw soft daylight onto the metal. These recesses give the open plan its quieter edges: places to sit, wait or watch while the centre of the room changes around them.

Artificial light follows the same adaptive rule as the furniture. Ceiling-mounted tracks with adjustable spotlights allow accents to be retargeted whenever stands move or a new installation arrives, with no invasive changes. The lighting works as part of the architectural framework, so each configuration, whether a brand launch, a talk or a retail day, can be lit to support its own story.

Why This Project Matters

Gallery GIF treats retail interiors as infrastructure rather than decoration. By removing everything down to the shell and building back only what can move, adjust or hold more than one function, Питерский produced a room that blurs the line between commercial and cultural space without needing a rebuild each time the program changes. The neutral envelope, colour-coded stands, storage hidden in the seating and re-aimable track lighting all work toward the same goal.

The project also shows how constraint can sharpen a concept. A small budget and a short timeline pushed it toward fewer materials, fewer layers and quicker decisions, and the result looks intentional rather than compromised. For designers working on adaptive reuse or multi-tenant retail, it offers a clear lesson: make the architecture calm and lasting, and let the colourful, changeable things be the parts that move.

View the Full Project

About the Designers

Designer: Сергей Питерский

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Project credits: Gallery GIF by Сергей Питерский Interiors ‘20 (uni.xyz).