project team: Bogdan Ciocodeica, Ana Porim
photo: Roald Aron
location: Bucharest / 2026
When Beans & Dots took over the former home of Suprainfinit Gallery, the transformation from exhibition space to coffee shop began with a decision not to erase what was already there. Located within a socialist-era building in Bucharest, the interior was approached as a space with several overlapping histories, architectural, cultural and material, that could become part of its new identity.
Rather than restoring the shell to an idealized condition, the project retains the traces of the building’s previous lives. The original stone flooring remains, while the ceiling is left exposed, preserving its uneven surfaces, imperfections and accumulated marks. These existing elements establish a deliberately raw framework for the new intervention and resist the polished uniformity often associated with contemporary hospitality interiors.
Against this backdrop, the café was conceived as an informal collection of objects rather than a fully coordinated interior. Vintage and reclaimed furniture is combined with simple contemporary pieces, allowing different periods and design languages to coexist. Black leather seating, tubular chrome tables and understated chairs introduce a familiar, almost domestic quality, while their apparent lack of preciousness encourages the space to be inhabited freely. The intention was to create an interior that feels assembled over time rather than designed all at once, comfortable, slightly eclectic and deliberately unpretentious.
The most assertive intervention is the wallpaper that wraps walls, columns and architectural fragments throughout the space. Conceived as a contemporary reinterpretation of the French verdure tapestry, its historic landscape motif is enlarged to an architectural scale and intentionally pixelated. From a distance, it reads as an immersive landscape; viewed more closely, the image dissolves into a distinctly contemporary digital texture. This oscillation between representation and abstraction allows something historically decorative to become almost architectural.
More importantly, the wallpaper establishes a conceptual bridge between the building’s recent past as an art gallery and its new life as a café. Rather than eliminating the curatorial character of the former Suprainfinit space, the walls continue to operate as surfaces for display. Paintings are placed directly against the dense landscape, turning the wallpaper simultaneously into background and exhibit. Art is no longer isolated against the neutrality of the white cube, but embedded within a layered visual field and incorporated into everyday life.
Its dark, muted palette also changes the perception of the existing concrete volume. Together with the deep brown curtains, it softens the hardness of the original shell and gives the café a more intimate scale. The curtains form a continuous, tactile backdrop against which artworks appear almost suspended, while also introducing a domestic quality that contrasts with the exposed ceiling and existing stone floor.
Elsewhere, the intervention remains intentionally restrained. The bar is treated as a singular dark volume, while stainless steel, chrome and reflective glass recur throughout the furniture, introducing a cooler register against the browns and ochres of the textiles and wallpaper. Small pools of coloured light punctuate this otherwise subdued palette, creating unexpected moments within the interior.
The result sits somewhere between café, living room and exhibition space. Instead of replacing one identity with another, the project allows them to overlap. The socialist-era architecture remains legible; the memory of the gallery persists through the presence and display of art; reclaimed and vintage objects introduce another layer of time; and the café brings a new, everyday occupation to the space.
Beans & Dots is therefore conceived less as a finished composition than as an inhabited backdrop, one capable of accumulating objects, artworks, people and stories over time. The design deliberately avoids perfection in favour of character, allowing the traces of what existed before to remain visible within what comes next.