AOI CELESTIE Coffee Roastery / Yuko Nagayama & Associates

Architects: Yuko Nagayama & Associates
Area: 690 m²
Year: 2024
Photographs: Nobutada OMOTE
Category: Coffee Shop, Mixed Use Architecture
City: Nagoya
Country: Japan

AOI Celestie Coffee Roastery in Nagoya is a three-story café and roastery designed by Yuko Nagayama & Associates for a local logistics company seeking to create a new community landmark. The project occupies a compact corner site at the junction of Nishiki-dori Street and Route 153, opposite Shinsakae-machi Station, forming part of a mixed-use complex with a basement event hall. Its architecture centers on a courtyard that channels daylight through multiple levels, crowned by a lightweight roof clad in custom Tajimi tiles with blue gradients. The design combines public openness with sensory calm, providing diverse experiences across floors from recessed seating at street level to a rooftop bar enveloped by the canopy. The project reimagines the contemporary café as a spatial retreat within the intensity of Nagoya’s urban core.

Aoi celestie coffee roastery / yuko nagayama & associates

The AOI Celestie Coffee Roastery establishes a contemplative presence at a busy Nagoya intersection, redefining the café as a civic space within the city’s dense commercial district. Conceived as a public gesture rather than a conventional retail frontage, the project extends hospitality beyond consumption, framing the act of gathering as an urban experience. Its architecture cultivates calm through proportion, light, and crafted materiality, allowing visitors to perceive the surrounding city from a position of quiet observation.

The café forms part of a mixed-use complex commissioned by a local logistics company intent on fostering neighborhood engagement. The building occupies a compact corner where major roads converge, enclosed by residential and commercial towers. Within this constrained site, Yuko Nagayama & Associates organized the volume around a central courtyard, introducing natural light and spatial relief to the dense context. A basement event hall lies beneath, while the three upper floors accommodate the café and roastery in vertically layered sequences of openness and intimacy.

Plan 1 — AOI CELESTIE Coffee Roastery / Yuko Nagayama & Associates 40

The courtyard functions as both heart and hinge. Positioned above the subterranean hall, its raised edge incorporates a high-side window that channels daylight deep into the lower level. Across the three stories, the interior connects through an atrium beneath an expansive roof, creating a continuous visual and spatial dialogue. The first floor contains the roastery, kitchen, and coffee counter, where recessed seating near glazed openings brings the street into view. Above, the second floor forms the primary seating area overlooking an olive grove planted within the courtyard, a gesture of stillness that contrasts with the surrounding movement of the city.

The third floor transitions into a more introspective space, where a bar is enveloped by the sloping canopy. Here, the rhythm of the roof structure defines the atmosphere, framing partial views of the courtyard and adjacent streets. The roof itself is constructed of custom ceramic tiles produced in Tajimi, their blue gradient achieved through variations in glaze thickness. The grooves of each tile channel rainwater into the planted garden below, integrating natural cycles into the building’s composition. In sunlight, the surface shimmers like flowing water; during rain, it becomes part of the site’s sensory continuum.

The architects describe the project as a “white space” within the city, a momentary pause amid the density of Nagoya. Through the precise calibration of light, texture, and enclosure, AOI Celestie Coffee Roastery transforms an ordinary corner into a locus of collective calm. Its design merges architectural clarity with atmospheric depth, affirming the potential of small urban interventions to redefine civic experience through spatial generosity and material craft.