East Beach Cafe, Littlehampton, England
East Beach Café, architect Thomas Heatherwick together with his design team headed by Peter Ayres
The cafe sits on the promenade facing out to sea – the Heatherwick Studio explains;
‘Rejecting the ubiquitous aesthetic of modern seaside buildings, of white sails, yachts and a romanticized bygone era, the studio wanted to evoke instead a more familiar experience of the texture and richness of a British beach, of stumbling around on damp brown shingle, spotting all that the sea has offered up: slimy pebbles, matted seaweed, old shoes, fragments of wood and tangled rope. The cafe would sit in the shingle like any other interesting seaside object’.
Created from
‘long, undulating ribbons of raw steel, the width of shutter boxes, wrapping around the internal space to form both roof and walls. Crossing the building from back to front, the angled geometry of the box ribbons articulates the otherwise flat facades that encase and protect the back of the building’.
Littlehampton, England
