MINOR lab Sculpts Volcanic Earth Walls into a Haikou Coffee Flagship for Fushan Coffee

Fushan coffee has been part of daily life in Hainan Province since the 1970s, brewed in tin pots and sold at roadside stalls long before specialty coffee culture arrived on the island. When the brand decided to open a flagship retail space in Haikou, the brief was not simply to design a café but to build a spatial narrative around agricultural lineage, local geology, and the ritual of drinking coffee together. MINOR lab, led by design principal Chen Liu, took on the renovation of a two-story concrete frame building and turned it into something that feels closer to an inhabited landscape than a shop.

What makes the project genuinely interesting is the material decision at its core. The curving walls that organize the ground floor are not decorative screens; they are thick, tactile masses whose earthy red texture references the volcanic soil of the Fushan coffee-growing region. These walls do not merely partition the plan. They rise to different heights, create framed openings, and interact with three continuous steel tables that punch through them, generating sightlines and circulation routes that keep the space legible without ever making it static. The result is a ground floor that MINOR lab calls a "Sculptural Field," and the name is earned.

Street Presence and Retained Character

From the street, the building does not shout. MINOR lab retained the original facade's materiality and offered only a modest restoration, keeping continuity with the surrounding retail context of residential towers and palm-lined sidewalks. A corrugated metal canopy extends over the ground-floor glazing, creating a sheltered threshold that signals the cafe without competing with its neighbors. At dusk the full-height glass becomes a lantern, revealing the sculptural interior to passersby. The restraint here is strategic: by keeping the exterior quiet, the interior experience lands with greater force.

The Sculptural Field: Ground Floor

The ground floor is organized by three curved walls that vary in height and curvature, carving distinct zones for seating, circulation, and display within an otherwise open plan. The walls' earthy texture carries visible traces of handwork, a deliberate roughness that connects the interior to the weathered volcanic red soil of the coffee-growing highlands sixty kilometers away. Exposed concrete beams and service ducts overhead are left raw, establishing a tension between the organic geometry of the brick partitions and the orthogonal discipline of the existing structure.

The stepped seating niches created by these walls are particularly effective. They frame views through multiple openings so that no seat feels walled off, yet each one offers a sense of enclosure. It is a coffee shop where you can choose your degree of sociability, which is a harder trick to pull off than it sounds.

Steel Tables as Infrastructure

Three continuous steel tables run through the ground floor, and their relationship to the curved walls is the project's most inventive detail. The tables pass through the brick partitions, creating openings and sightlines that tie separate zones together. Where a welded steel leg meets red brick masonry, the joint is left exposed, celebrating the collision of materials rather than concealing it. These tables serve as communal dining surfaces, display platforms, and spatial connectors all at once.

The corrugated metal cladding that wraps the service counter picks up the language of the exterior canopy, creating a visual thread between street and interior. Stacked stools beside the communal table overlook green foliage through the facade glazing, reinforcing the transparency that lets the tropical landscape participate in the interior.

Counter and Vertical Connection

The counter zone is a composite volume handling display, service, and circulation in a single gesture that extends vertically to the stairwell. Espresso equipment sits beneath a perforated metal mesh mezzanine railing, and the corrugated metal cladding wraps the counter in a way that reads as both industrial and warm. The timber staircase connecting the two levels is flanked by expanded metal mesh screens that filter daylight through the concrete beams above, producing a dappled quality of light that shifts through the day.

The mesh screens do more than control light. They establish a visual porosity between floors, so the roasting lab upstairs is glimpsed from below, drawing visitors upward with curiosity rather than signage.

The Coffee Laboratory: Upper Level

The second floor operates as what MINOR lab calls a "coffee laboratory," dedicated to roasting techniques, cupping sessions, barista training, and knowledge sharing. The roasting machine is the focal point, and the layout is organized around a long communal table surrounded by white stools where staff and customers engage with the production process side by side. Full-height glazing on the street-facing wall overlooks palm trees and floods the workspace with natural light.

Perforated metal screens and timber flooring soften the raw concrete interior, and a modular aluminum profile system integrates display shelving and lighting with dimensional clarity. The upper floor's character is deliberately cleaner and more precise than the ground floor's earthen roughness, reinforcing the conceptual shift from cultural immersion below to technical rigor above.

Material Palette and Atmosphere

MINOR lab's material palette holds a productive tension between rough and refined. Stone, brick, and coating give the ground floor its geological weight, while stainless steel, glass, and the modular aluminum system bring precision to the upper level. The balance is not accidental; it maps onto the brand's own identity as a company rooted in agricultural tradition but operating within contemporary specialty coffee culture. Glass-enclosed office pods and orange lounge chairs near floor-to-ceiling windows on the upper level are the most overtly modern elements, yet they feel proportionate rather than jarring.

Making and Process

Construction photographs reveal the labor embedded in the design. Curving brick partitions were built on raised steel platforms beneath exposed services, and the perforated metal tables were assembled by hand among the brick walls. A physical model shows white textured panels with openings supported by black steel frames, capturing the essential idea of punctured mass before any brick was laid. The model's rough-edged panels intersecting horizontal beams are a surprisingly faithful preview of the finished space.

Showing the making process matters here because the project is fundamentally about making visible what is usually hidden: the soil coffee grows in, the labor of roasting, the craft of building. The handwork traces in the earthy wall texture are not a stylistic choice but a philosophical one.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plans clarify how the curved walls and angled tables generate variety within a compact 211 square meter footprint. The ground-floor plan shows the communal seating area with tables set at angles to the facade, refusing the typical grid layout of a retail cafe. The upper-floor plan maps the roasting lab and communal table flanked by stair cores. The axonometric drawing is particularly revealing, showing both levels with their interior partitions, furniture layout, and the exterior terrace as a single legible system. The section drawing exposes the three-story structure with its red structural frame and the palm trees that define the streetscape context.

Why This Project Matters

Specialty coffee interiors have become one of the most oversaturated categories in retail design, and most of them converge on the same palette of terrazzo, pale timber, and Instagram-friendly minimalism. MINOR lab's Fushan Coffee space rejects that template by grounding its design in a specific geology, a specific agricultural history, and a specific material logic. The curved volcanic-red walls are not an aesthetic gesture; they are an argument about what a coffee brand's flagship should communicate. They tell you where the beans come from before you read a single menu item.

The project also demonstrates that a renovation of a generic concrete frame building can produce spatial richness without relying on dramatic structural interventions. The curved walls and continuous steel tables are insertions, not transformations, and their power comes from the precision of their relationships to each other and to the existing structure. At 211 square meters, this is a small project with a clear idea executed with conviction, and that combination is rarer than it should be.

A Local Renewal of Fushan Coffee by MINOR lab (Chen Liu, Dan Zhao, Weixi Jin). Haikou, Hainan Province, China. 211 m². Completed 2025. Photography by Arch Nango.

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