These two young women had a dream: to open a magical bakery for sweet desserts
Michelle Elhanani (right) and Shira Eran – the owners of the bakery
Their dream included American recipes with a French look. That is – sweet, delicious, exaggerated, and very beautiful.
The products: American desserts with a French look, in a magical pink atmosphere.
The design idea theme was to create a magical place, with an atmosphere of a fairytale.
The entrepreneurs came up with very solid and detailed ideas for designing the bakery. My role as an architect was mainly to help them make their ideas come true.
(Disclosure: Since one of the two women is my daughter, I can testify that from the age of ten she has been formulating this concept, constantly collecting thoughts and ideas and dreams).
We needed the following functions for the bakery:
*a spacious and sophisticated professional kitchen
*a small coffee house, with inside and outside seats
*Display for products: cakes, cupcakes, bars, cookies
*Sales counter with enough room to prepare the products for deliveries
The site chosen was formerly a stationery store – large and spacious, well located between office towers and a residential area, but quite ugly:
This is the stationery store that existed on the site. How do you design a magical kingdom in this sad space?
The predominant color is pink.
A warm, friendly, somewhat childish color that is instantly associated with sweetness and joy. This is why many bakeries around the world are painted pink – so much so that the audience has learned to associate sweet desserts with the color pink.
The only separation between the store and the street is a huge window, so that the store is fully lit and very visible from the outside:
A gate of pink flowers leads the customers into the bakery….
….and into a special world.
At the entrance stands a beautiful unicorn the size of a real horse..
You can sit on it, and take a picture (the adults see a horse in it, the children straight up correct them that it is not a horse but a unicorn, and they are right of course).
Into the store we loaded up all the goodies – just like in the recipes for the wonderful pastries that are made here. Everything is a bit exaggerated, a bit absurd, but in a way that makes everyone who enters smile happily and feel like a child in Wonderland.
The wall behind the unicorn is completely decorated with sculptures.
They simulate pastries in colors that fit the entire store. These, like the unicorn at the entrance, are works by a stage designer who was especially comissioned for the job.
Three-dimensional desserts, 100 times larger than the real ones, bring many smiles and get many instagram photos
On the other side of the entrance is the inner seating area.
It contains a large pink sofa, specially imported tables and chairs, and in the center – a large, blossoming cherry tree.
The place is lit by huge golden chandeliers.
The lighting is LED lighting, but we made sure to install bulbs that give a warm yellow light, which adds to the magical atmosphere.
How we display the pasteries:
On the back wall of the store, two units of bookshelves, each 3.5 m high, were installed, specially commissioned to a carpenter who specializes in this type of furniture. They are used for storage, partly hiding the coffee and ice machines. They are painted in white and gold and decorated in an antique.
The back wall of each bookshelf is a mirror, which reflects the entire store, the golden chandeliers, the special packaging and the products sold.
The display counter, which is the center of the store, is decorated in the same style – white with gold ornaments and a black display surface for the tasteful products.
The patisseries themselves are displayed against a background of black porcelain granite, with gold capillaries, to highlight their colorfulness:
Because the bakery’s target audience lives in the Instagram era, the design was done with the intention of providing them with lots of photography options – as here, in the bathroom wall:
As expected, the bakery received a lot of media coverage.Here are some examples:
