OOAA Guts a Nine-Meter Warehouse in Buenos Aires and Rebuilds It Around an Olive Tree

There is a particular kind of warehouse that Buenos Aires has in abundance: high-walled, blunt, utterly indifferent to the street. In the Núñez neighborhood, where residential density is slowly rewriting the old industrial grain, OOAA (Oficios Asociados) found one of these corner boxes, a former storage shed with nine-meter walls and no architectural ambitions, and turned it into Ness + N3ss, a 433-square-meter restaurant, bar, and production kitchen completed in 2024. Lead architects Manuel Nesta and Esteban Rodriguez kept the shell almost untouched on the outside. On the inside, they removed every load-bearing wall that once subdivided the ground floor, replaced them with steel beams and columns, and reorganized the entire volume around a new service core. The result is a single triple-height room where cooking, eating, and daylight all converge.

What makes the project worth studying is its refusal to treat adaptive reuse as a cosmetic exercise. The warehouse was not merely cleaned up and fitted with furniture. Its spatial logic was fundamentally restructured while its exterior presence, austere and mute, was preserved almost intact. The three original ground-floor shutters remain as entry points. The small upper-level openings stay where they were. The building still reads as a warehouse from the sidewalk, but step through the angled entrance setback and you land in a space governed by completely different rules: open sightlines, zenithal skylights, a living olive tree growing through the concrete slab, and a stainless-steel kitchen that makes no effort to hide.

Keeping the Shell, Losing the Walls

From the street, the building barely announces itself. A cream-colored facade with a large ground-floor opening, a white brick base, and the occasional polycarbonate canopy are the only signals that something has changed. OOAA deliberately maintained the warehouse's industrial character, preserving the simple volume and the rough texture of the nine-meter walls. The restraint is strategic: in a neighborhood where new construction tends toward glass and metal, the old warehouse's blunt presence becomes its distinction.

The polycarbonate panels that now line sections of the facade do double duty. They admit diffused daylight without exposing the interior to full transparency, and at dusk they glow warmly from within, turning the building into a lantern. It is a minimal intervention with maximum atmospheric effect.

The Threshold and the Angled Entry

Rather than punching a grand new opening in the facade, OOAA set the entrance back from the street on an angle, creating a transitional zone between the sidewalk and the interior. A steel-framed canopy and translucent polycarbonate screens mediate between the noise of the city and the quieter register of the dining space. It is a compression point: you pass through a covered walkway where the exposed steel structure is visible overhead, and then the volume opens dramatically.

A sculptural bench on the sidewalk marks the threshold without blocking it, and the ribbed polycarbonate panels frame the street beyond, offering glimpses back out. The entry sequence is carefully choreographed to shift your awareness from the urban context to the scale of the interior.

Triple Height, Single Room

Once inside, the building's secret is out. The entire ground floor operates as one continuous space, with the hempcrete ceiling and exposed ductwork floating nine meters above. Sunlight pours through skylights and floor-to-ceiling glazing, casting long patterns across the polished concrete floor. The metal carpentry system that replaced the original masonry walls defines programmatic zones, separating bar from dining from kitchen, without ever interrupting the visual continuity of the room.

Suspended paper lamps, timber slat screens, and sheer curtains subdivide the space optically at different moments of the day. The effect is cinematic: the light moves, the curtains shift, and the room feels different at noon than it does at eight in the evening. OOAA understood that in a room this tall, atmosphere is not decoration. It is structure.

The Olive Tree and the Cooking Island

Two elements anchor the interior. The first is an olive tree that grows directly through the polished concrete slab, surrounded by timber benches and bathed in zenithal light from the skylight above. It is a bold, almost theatrical move, but it works because the tree is not purely symbolic. It defines a seating zone, provides scale against the towering walls, and introduces organic texture to a palette otherwise dominated by steel and concrete.

The second anchor is the freestanding wood-fired oven and its metal flue, flanked by wire mesh firewood storage and the open kitchen beyond. The dining room extends seamlessly to the kitchen with no separation, a deliberate choice that puts the act of cooking on full display. Stainless-steel counters, coolers, and the prominent exhaust systems of the central cooking island are treated as architectural elements, not back-of-house infrastructure to be hidden.

Material Honesty and Craft

The material palette is tight: steel, concrete, fabric, timber, and hempcrete. What gives it richness is the specificity of each application. The hempcrete ceiling panels, visible throughout, provide both insulation and a warm, textured surface that absorbs the room's acoustics. Curved translucent glass partitions with brass frames create gentle spatial separations without blocking light. Timber post-and-beam joinery details are exposed where structure meets wall, giving the building a legible tectonic logic.

Custom furniture reinforces the same language. Slatted timber chairs, round plywood tables with curved edges, and timber benches are all designed in-house, tying the smaller-scale elements to the larger architectural vocabulary. Nothing feels imported from a catalogue. Every piece reads as a continuation of the same design thinking that shaped the space.

Light as a Design Tool

The introduction of skylights into the formerly sealed warehouse roof is probably the single most consequential design decision in the project. Zenithal light washes down through the triple-height volume, creating pools of brightness that migrate across the floor over the course of a day. The combination of overhead light and the translucent polycarbonate facade produces a soft, even glow that avoids harsh contrasts.

At night, the equation reverses. Interior lighting illuminates the hempcrete ceiling from below, and the polycarbonate walls emit a warm amber glow to the street. The building participates differently in the neighborhood depending on the hour. It is a passive strategy with active consequences for both the dining experience inside and the urban presence outside.

Details and Atmosphere

The smaller moments matter here. Slatted timber chairs beside fluted glass windows overlooking the winter landscape outside. An olive branch chandelier suspended over a bench seat and white curtain. Grey concrete shelving against a vertical timber slat wall with trailing plants cascading from above. These are not afterthoughts; they are deliberate calibrations of texture, color, and material that ensure the space holds together at every scale.

The interplay of hard and soft surfaces, stainless steel against hempcrete, polished concrete against sheer fabric, keeps the space from tipping into either industrial coldness or overwrought warmth. OOAA found the balance point and held it.

Plans and Drawings

The floor plans reveal the strategic simplicity of the intervention. The structural grid is regular and the open area dominates, with restrooms and workspaces pushed to the perimeter. The angled outdoor terrace with its circular seating arrangement confirms that the spatial openness of the interior extends outward. The sections are where the project's ambition becomes clear: the double-height spaces, the exposed rafters, the interior tree reaching toward the skylight, and the mezzanine that tucks into the upper volume all register as a single, legible spatial idea.

The axonometric drawings show the relationship between the two levels, the circulation cores, and the canted roof form that defines the building's profile. What reads as effortless openness in the photographs is, in the drawings, a carefully calibrated choreography of structure, program, and environmental strategy.

Why This Project Matters

Adaptive reuse projects often fall into one of two traps. They either over-preserve, treating the original building as a museum of itself, or they gut everything and wear the old walls as a costume. Ness + N3ss does neither. OOAA removed the interior structure entirely, replacing masonry walls with steel, but preserved the exterior shell with a discipline that borders on stubbornness. The warehouse still looks like a warehouse. The restaurant inside operates on its own spatial terms. The tension between the two conditions is precisely what gives the project its energy.

In a city where the pressure to demolish and rebuild is constant, keeping the nine-meter walls and working within their constraints is both an economic and a cultural argument. It says that Buenos Aires already has the raw material for its next generation of public spaces; it just needs architects willing to look at what is already there. OOAA looked, and what they found was enough.

Ness + N3ss Restaurant by OOAA (Oficios Asociados), lead architects Manuel Nesta and Esteban Rodriguez. Núñez, Buenos Aires, Argentina. 433 m². Completed 2024. Photography by Fernando Schapochnik.

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