Sawerdo Bakery: Four Materials, One Room

On a stone-fronted street in Switzerland, a bakery glows warm through black-framed windows. Sawerdo Coffee and Bakery, designed by BUREAU, is a cafe and artisan bakery fitted into an existing ground floor space. The design uses four materials to create the entire atmosphere: grey square tiles on every surface, pink marble on the communal table, pink copper tubes for the pendant lights, and white wire mesh for the counter and partitions. Nothing else. No wood panelling, no feature walls, no accent paint. Four materials, one room.

The name Sawerdo comes from sourdough. The bakery produces artisan bread and pastries on site, with the kitchen visible through a wire mesh screen behind the counter. BUREAU designed the interior as a single continuous surface of grey tile, punctuated by the organic curves of the marble table and the copper lights. The result is a cafe that is simultaneously industrial and warm, minimal and inviting.

The Interior: Tile, Marble, and Copper

The interior is a single room lined in grey square tiles: walls, columns, and the lower portion of every surface. An organic-shaped marble communal table sits at the centre, its surface veined in pink and cream. Bent plywood chairs surround it. Above, pink copper tube pendant lights hang from the concrete ceiling in curving, branch-like forms. An arched mirror on the ceiling reflects the street through the shopfront window. A cactus sits in the corner. The room is grey, pink, and warm.

The large arched window frames the street and brings daylight into the depth of the plan. The copper tubes catch the light and glow. The marble table reflects it. The grey tiles absorb it. The balance between these three responses to light is what gives the room its quality.

The Counter and Display

The bakery counter has a pink curved edge that matches the marble table. Behind it, metal shelving on the tiled wall holds pastries, a coffee machine, wine bottles, and plants. The shelving is industrial: thin steel rods and wire, deliberately unfinished. The bread is displayed on open metal shelves against the tiled wall. Sourdough loaves sit on the racks like objects in a gallery. The display strategy is simple: grey background, metal shelf, bread. No baskets, no chalkboards, no clutter.

The Kitchen: Visible Through Wire Mesh

The bakery kitchen is visible through a white wire mesh partition. Stainless steel equipment, ovens, and work surfaces are on display. The wire mesh is a white tubular steel frame with a rounded corner, serving as both partition and counter. The transparency is deliberate: you can see the bread being made. The wire mesh is the lightest possible division between front of house and back of house. It separates without enclosing.

Details: Copper, Marble, and Tile

The details reward close attention. The copper tube pendant lights curve organically from the concrete ceiling, each tube ending in a bare bulb. They look like branches or roots, the only soft form in a room of hard surfaces. The marble table surface shows its full veining up close: pink, cream, and grey in geological patterns. The grey tiles meet the floor in a continuous surface that wraps from wall to ground without a skirting board. Every junction is clean. Every material is exposed.

Night: The Shopfront

At night, the shopfront is the best view. SAWERDO is written in simple serif letters on the stone facade. The black-framed windows show the lit interior: the marble table, the copper lights, the tiled walls, the bread on the shelves. The stone building is old. The interior is new. The contrast between the heritage facade and the contemporary fit-out is the project's strongest image.

Plans

The floor plan shows the layout: the bakery kitchen at the rear with an arched wall (following the existing building), the cafe seating in the middle around the marble table, and an outdoor terrace with a tree at the front. The section reveals that the cafe is on the upper level with the copper lights and metal shelving, while the kitchen and storage occupy a lower level connected by a stair. The split level allows the kitchen to be visible from the cafe through the wire mesh while keeping the heavy equipment below the seating.

Why This Project Matters

Cafe interiors are one of the most over-designed categories in architecture. Most cafes layer materials: timber, tile, metal, concrete, paint, neon, plants, and graphics, all in one room. BUREAU did the opposite. They chose four materials and used them for everything. Grey tile is the background. Pink marble is the table. Pink copper is the light. White wire mesh is the partition. The discipline is what makes the room work. Nothing competes. Nothing distracts. The bread and the coffee are the only decoration.

If you are designing a cafe, a bakery, or any small commercial interior where material restraint matters more than visual noise, Sawerdo is worth studying for how four materials and one continuous surface can produce an atmosphere that most cafes need twenty materials to attempt.

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Project credits: Sawerdo Coffee and Bakery by BUREAU. Switzerland. Photographs: Dylan Perrenoud.