LOVE Architecture Turns a 1900 Carpentry Workshop into a Sensory Spice Emporium in Graz

There is something seductive about a building that refuses to announce itself. Tucked into one of Graz's so-called secret places in the Lendviertel district, the Van den Berg Spice Shop by LOVE architecture and urbanism occupies a former carpentry workshop dating to 1900. The Gebetsberger workshop had the bones: exposed brick walls, steel fixtures, a black bitumen floor, and the generous ceiling heights of a working trades building. Lead architects Tamara Frisch and Lena Pechmann chose not to erase that inheritance but to paint it white, flatten the hierarchy of old and new, and let the spices themselves supply all the color a retail space could ever need.

The result is a three-story program that reads more like a botanical greenhouse crossed with a cocktail lounge than a conventional shop. A showroom and retail floor sit alongside a vermouth bar with rooftop ambitions, a vaulted cellar for spirits, and spaces set aside for tastings, tours, and cooking classes. Every surface is deliberately neutral, a loft-like canvas of white metalwork and painted brick, so that the hanging gardens, the jars, and the customers themselves become the spectacle. It is a project where restraint in architecture amplifies everything that is not architecture.

A Courtyard That Glows

The courtyard announces the project's logic before you step inside. A white tubular steel canopy stretches between existing residential buildings, its grid carrying clear and yellow-tinted glass panels that filter daylight into what the architects describe as "Caribbean light." Colored foils embedded in the glazing cast warm tones across the ground plane, transforming a landlocked Austrian courtyard into something that feels sun-drenched even on overcast days. By night the effect inverts: the structure glows from within, suspended planters silhouetted against the illuminated frame.

From above, the aerial view reveals the canopy as a precise rectangular insertion into the irregular block. The yellow-framed windows of the original building meet the new metalwork without friction. A bench beneath the canopy, bathed in sunlight, suggests that this is not just a passage between street and shop but a destination in its own right.

White Walls as a Neutral Stage

Inside, every wall has been painted white. Brick texture remains visible, grain and mortar joints reading through the paint like a palimpsest, but the uniform color eliminates the competition between original and inserted elements. Floating shelves display product bottles in neat rows, their amber and green glass catching the light. The existing black bitumen floor, extended wall to wall across all areas, provides a grounding counterpoint: dark underfoot, bright overhead.

Wire mesh partitions subdivide the loft-like plan without closing it down. They allow air and sightlines to pass through while giving climbing vines a structure to colonize. The effect is that of a working greenhouse rather than a polished boutique. You can see from the shop floor through to the bar, from the display shelves down into the vaulted cellar stair. The architecture is deliberately porous, encouraging movement and curiosity.

Hanging Gardens as Architecture

The hanging gardens are the project's signature gesture. Suspended from cable systems attached to the ceiling structure, white fabric and mesh planters hold herbs, ferns, trailing vines, and even root vegetables like carrots. They float at eye level and above, creating a canopy of living material that softens the industrial bones without concealing them. Glass sphere terrariums are mounted along the walls, each a self-contained ecosystem that visitors can examine up close.

What makes this work is the consistency of the planting infrastructure. The planters, the cables, the mesh panels are all white, all lightweight, all reversible. Nothing is bolted to the historic fabric in a way that would damage it. The plants do the heavy lifting of atmosphere: they supply scent, color, and seasonal change in a building whose permanent elements are deliberately muted. It is a strategy that treats planting not as decoration but as the primary architectural material of the interior.

Thresholds and Sliding Screens

Boundaries between rooms are marked by white mesh sliding doors rather than conventional partitions. One such door, flanked by potted ferns and framed against the dark bitumen floor, operates as a screen that you read through rather than a wall that stops you. Pushed to one side, it disappears; pulled across, it filters the view into a layered depth of greenery and shelving beyond.

Throughout the space, columns are treated as furniture rather than structure. Legs propped against a white column beside suspended planters suggest the kind of relaxed occupation the architects clearly intended. These are not rooms to move through quickly. The sliding screens, the planters overhead, the glimpses of adjacent spaces all conspire to slow the visitor down, to make browsing feel like exploration.

Color as Event

When color does arrive, it arrives deliberately. In one room, geometric seating blocks in saturated orange, blue, and yellow sit beneath a suspended white tube lighting fixture, their bright faces punching against the white walls and exposed ceiling beams. These are movable, stackable objects that can be rearranged for cooking classes or tastings, turning a retail space into an event space with minimal effort.

The architects' concept draws a direct line from spice to space: spices enhance, aromatize, preserve, and transform. The design borrows the same logic. A neutral base is seasoned with plants, products, furniture, and light, each ingredient measured to avoid overwhelming the whole. The colored glazing in the courtyard canopy, the amber glass on the shelves, and the vivid seating blocks are all controlled doses of intensity against a backdrop that absorbs them without flinching.

Plans and Drawings

The site plan shows the building's red rectangular footprint wedged among surrounding grey volumes, confirming its hidden courtyard condition. The floor plan reveals an interior organized around the open retail floor with orange furniture elements, a timber deck extending toward landscape plantings, and the mesh partitions that subdivide without enclosing. The longitudinal section is especially revealing: a scalloped roof profile shelters a lush interior of potted plants and hanging gardens, the building reading in section more like a conservatory than a shop.

Detail drawings of the modular storage units show wheeled bases and hanging compartments, pieces designed to be repositioned as the program shifts between retail, tasting, and event modes. Timber workbenches with adjustable configurations reinforce the flexibility. The elevation drawings, showing the warehouse volumes with their hanging greenery and exposed red brick, capture the building's double identity: industrial relic from the street, tropical interior behind the door.

Why This Project Matters

The Van den Berg Spice Shop is a case study in how to activate a heritage building without turning it into a museum of itself. By painting everything white and extending the existing bitumen floor, LOVE architecture and urbanism collapsed the distinction between original and new, creating a unified container that foregrounds its contents over its construction. The hanging gardens, the colored glass, the movable furniture are all layered on top of a deliberately quiet substrate. It is a strategy that gives the client a maximally flexible space while giving the building permission to age without anxiety.

More broadly, the project argues that retail architecture does not need spectacle in its bones. The spectacle here comes from spices, from plants, from the social rituals of tasting and cooking. The architecture's job is to stay out of the way while making those rituals feel inevitable. In an era when every shop wants to be an "experience," this one earns the word honestly: it converts a carpenter's workshop into a place where you want to linger, smell, taste, and return. That conversion, quiet as it is, is the most difficult kind of architecture to pull off.

Van den Berg Spice Shop by LOVE architecture and urbanism, led by Tamara Frisch and Lena Pechmann. Graz, Austria. 548 m². Completed 2022. Photography by Stefan Leitner.

About the Studio

Share Your Own Work on uni.xyz

If projects like this are the kind of work you want to make, uni.xyz is a place to publish your own, find collaborators, and enter design competitions.