Choi Dining Seongsu
- LOCATION
- Seongsu-dong, Seoul
- SCALE
- 132㎡
- PURPOSE
- F&B
- SERVICES
- Space Design, Construction, Furniture Fabrication, Branding
- BUDGET RANGE
- KRW 88,000,000
- YEAR
- 2023
"Somewhere you have seen before, yet nowhere you have ever been."
Choi Dining is an American Japanese diner, a brand that brings a hybrid identity of American and Japanese food to Korea. It already had several locations and an in-house branding team, so its graphic branding was more or less in place. Its spatial branding, however, had not been defined. That made the work harder than if there had been no standard at all.
American Japanese is a genre that barely exists in Korea, so we started by defining the genre. The motif came from the Japanese kissaten. Between the 1970s and the 1990s, Japan saw a flourishing dining and cafe culture shaped by American influence, centered on Western-style cooking. We borrowed American colors and motifs and reinterpreted them with the compact, solid density particular to Japan.
A franchise needs photo spots. So we brought the backlit flex signs that were once common not only outside but inside as well, so that wherever a photo is taken, at least one logo lands in the frame. This grammar is essential for a franchise.
Boutique franchise work is always a fight with the budget. The key is how effectively and how strongly the brand’s color can be shown within a limited budget, in a design that also lifts sales. Franchises want the maximum number of seats, so the floor plan has to be extremely efficient as well.
We laid out the seats so densely that not one more could fit. At the same time, the design was worked out carefully so the space would still look relaxed.
Seongsu holds 52 seats in 132 square meters, and Bupyeong holds 40 seats in 90 square meters. We set the spacing so serving would flow without trouble, and in Seongsu we built the seating mainly around sofas. Back-to-back sofas in the manner of a family restaurant and a partition down the middle fill the room. Muted yet colorful tones, plush chairs of the kind once found in old coffee houses, sofas set back to back as in family restaurants, and a central partition for seating efficiency. We brought back the spatial grammar of the old American diner, rarely used anymore.
In the end, two spaces emerged that feel like somewhere you have seen before, yet like nowhere you have ever been. Colorful yet orderly, dense yet at ease. It was a design that tested how far a franchise can be branded.