Vivarium

Vivarium, a restaurant designed by a young Thai design agency, Hypothesis, won this year’s INSIDE award in the bars and restaurants category. Announced at the INSIDE World Festival of Interiors in Singapore, the converted industrial warehouse in Bangkok demonstrates the firm’s novel technique of adaptive reuse as a strategy to preserve the project’s contextual history, to create dialectics between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’, and to minimize the project’s construction cost.

Old vs. New
In order to highlight the former industrial characteristics of the warehouse, the majority of the existing structure was kept unchanged but delineated from the new addition through the differentiation of finishing colors – the old parts were kept in their original white color whereas the new additions were painted with red rust protection primer – accentuating the contrast between the old and the new. To minimize the renovation budget, Hypothesis employed found objects from around the site – iron doors, steel pipes, dead branches, and tree roots – as decorative interior elements, as well as using scaffolding structures, inspired by the ones previously existed on