Check Out The Gorgeous Coffee House This Maltese Architect Just Unveiled In London’s Largest Royal Park
A Maltese architect has just unveiled a gorgeous new coffee house overlooking the Serpentine Lake in London. Jonathan Mizzi’s structure is part of a wider commission to transform 10 prestigious sites across London’s Royal Parks with individually crafted, free-standing architectural structures, in partnership with artisan Italian café operators, Colicci.
“It is an honour to have been entrusted with creating a new landmark for such a unique and beautiful setting within The Royal Parks. Visitors will be greeted by the welcoming smile formed by the coffee house’s curving canopy, before the glistening reptilian underbelly is revealed, providing a haven to pause and appreciate nature in the city,” Mizzi said.
Located between the Serpentine Galleries, with views across the Serpentine Lake and out towards the Princess Diana Memorial Fountain, the new Serpentine Coffee House is an open, semi-transparent glass pavilion, evoking the architecture traditionally seen in Japanese tea-houses, which creates a lightness that helps the building to integrate seamlessly into the landscape.
Its undulating canopy, designed to respond to the movement of the lake, has been hand-painted using specialist techniques, and is intricately textured on the underside with snakeskin-inspired, coffer-like dimples. Tapered towards its edges, it cantilevers over the glass structure below to create extensive open-air seating, with capacity for 60 people to sit under and around it, within the parkland.
Following the opening of the Serpentine Coffee House, the transformation of the final three sites will be completed later in the autumn, including the flagship brass Horseshoe coffee house in St James’s Park, with Buckingham Palace as its backdrop, and two steam-bent oak structures in St James’s Park and Hyde Park.
Mizzi is also the brains behind a design re-imagination of Malta’s old buses which was unveiled last April.
