daruma / roji

In the front, facing the street: Daruma, a tiny grab-and-go Japanese convenience store serving lunch to downtown workers during the day. In the back, off the alley: Roji, an 8-seat high end omakase bar, open only at night. These two worlds rarely cross, yet share the built environment with each other. If Daruma engenders convenience, Roji’s day-of, reservation-only model defies it. Bright/dark, soft/firm, natural/processed, public/secret - opposites attract and get amplified to create a unified whole.

On both sides of a shared kitchen, space is not defined by the shell walls of the extremely small footprint, but by a series of overlapping textures to create a sense of depth. In Daruma, rows of colorful products cover most of the wall area, giving way to warm wood shelves on clean white walls with generous natural lighting. In Roji, traditional noren give a soft feeling of enclosure around concrete point lights for each diner at the monolithic wood sushi bar, contrasted with a black yakisugi burnt-cedar backdrop.