COLORBAND STORE

LIMA, PERÚ

Hybrid café, pantry and courtyard bar · 2021
Location: Lima, Peru ·

Program: café + retail + courtyard bar
Status: built (space closed, elements repurposed)
Role: concept, interior architecture, furniture and graphic floor design

“Space is a doubt: I have constantly to mark it, to designate it. It’s never mine, never given to me, I have to conquer it.”

Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (1974)

Colorband transformed a narrow storefront and a forgotten courtyard in central Lima into one continuous interior of color and reuse. With a stubborn existing shell and a minimal budget, we worked through the building rather than against it, treating the daily act of eating as a choreography of cuts, stripes and salvaged fragments.

Old timber floorboards were lifted, recut and re-laid as a graphic runway of blue, pink and yellow that pulls visitors from street to garden. Existing shelving and bar structures stayed in place but were sleeved in matte yellow, deep ultramarine and white, turning inherited storage into a bold display for bottles and everyday objects. New pieces appear as precise insertions: thin steel frames drawing a lightweight room in the courtyard, a long communal table and blue bar designed to migrate to future projects, and a low “wave” of semicircular plywood off-cuts, stained indigo with gilded edges.

On the street, a periwinkle upper facade and black ground-floor base frame the interior like a vitrine. The shop has since closed, but many of its components—the tables, frames and sections of the patterned floor—have been salvaged and reinstalled elsewhere, extending the life of the project beyond its original address.