Okkio Nguyễn Siêu Café by Red5studio: A Cinematic Coffee Experience Inspired by Wong Kar-Wai

A Bold Spatial Narrative Rooted in Cinematic Memory

Okkio Nguyễn Siêu Café by Red5studio reimagines the boutique coffee brand’s identity through a highly immersive, film-inspired architectural concept. Building on their earlier Saigon project completed three years prior, the design team focused on preserving the brand’s core aesthetic while elevating it through expressive color, dynamic lighting, and atmospheric storytelling. The result is a 180-square-meter interior that captures the emotional intensity and temporal fluidity of Wong Kar-Wai’s legendary film 2046, transforming the café into a spatial metaphor for memory, motion, and the passage of time.

A Coffee Space Influenced by Wong Kar-Wai’s Film Language

The design draws directly from the cinematic world of 2046, where time becomes fragmented and characters travel through memory on a return train from the future. If Okkio Xuan Thuy represents the film’s beginning, Okkio Nguyễn Siêu acts as the narrative climax, where time entangles and experiences collide. The café becomes an imagined futuristic train journey, a place suspended between past and future—a reflective realm from which no one ever returns unchanged.

Transforming an Underground-like Site into a Dynamic Color Landscape

Although the café is located on the ground floor, its low ceiling, dense beams, multiple columns, and minimal access to daylight resemble an old underground basement. Instead of disguising these qualities, Red5studio amplifies them, using the structural constraints as the foundation for a rhythmic, train-like interior. The architects introduce flowing strips of color that glide across floors, walls, and ceilings, creating continuous motion that reenacts the sensation of boarding a futuristic locomotive.

Interwoven Spaces Defined by Color, Light, and Movement

Spatial organization emerges from strips of moving color that guide circulation and seating arrangements. The check-in zone, main entrance, and guest seating are interlaced without interfering with each other, forming a fluid buffer zone that enhances guest comfort. Sliding glass doors and translucent plastic curtains allow the café to shift between layouts, offering a sense of flexibility and constant reinvention. By repositioning doors and furniture, the design team can subtly transform the café’s atmosphere, ensuring every visit feels unique.

A Striped Identity Across Facade, Furniture, and Bar

The café’s façade adopts the same striped visual language, with contrasting green and red tones chosen for their retro, cinematic appeal. The Okkio logo stretches into elongated polycarbonate strips, paired with a synchronized LED lighting system that glows vividly by day and creates an animated, futuristic ambience by night. The recessed storefront generates a double setback, introducing green patches and mirror-clad pillars that form a dedicated check-in point while enhancing the streetside identity of the café.

Spatial Chaos as a Design Strategy

The design celebrates controlled chaos through layered materials and shifting perspectives. To address the low ceiling height and numerous beams, additional conjugate beams divide the overhead plane into smaller segments. Angled mirrors mounted across the space create multi-directional reflections, making the café feel taller and visually interconnected. This kaleidoscopic effect mirrors the narrative technique of Wong Kar-Wai, where memories overlap and dissolve into one another.

Material Experimentation and Visual Depth

Red5studio combines materials from their previous project—such as specialty effect paints and color polycarbonate panels—with new layers of chromatized steel, striped glass, stained glass, acid-etched mirrors, and dichroic film. These additions heighten the futuristic aesthetic, generating shifting reflections and prismatic light. Sliding color glass doors and plastic curtains extend the sense of movement, while overhead lighting interacts with dichroic surfaces to create constantly changing tones depending on the viewer’s position.

Lighting as a Storytelling Medium

The café’s lighting strategy expresses the continuous flow of time. LED strips begin at the façade and run deep into the interior, seamlessly merging with pendant lights, circular wall light boxes, and table lamps in varying sizes and rhythms. These layered lighting compositions shift throughout the day, producing atmospheric scenes that evoke different emotional states—an architectural translation of Wong Kar-Wai’s signature cinematic mood.

A Still Point Within the Movement of the City

Situated along the lively Nguyễn Siêu Street, the café remains visually still yet emotionally dynamic, animated by the interplay of light, color, and human activity. Movement unfolds differently for each visitor, echoing the filmmaker’s exploration of longing and imagined encounters in 2046 and In the Mood for Love. Guests experience a blend of reality and illusion—sometimes transparent, sometimes blurred, and often reflective—capturing the poetic ambiguity that defines both Wong Kar-Wai’s films and Okkio’s evolving architectural identity.

All photographs are works of  Đỗ Sỹ