Our project at Cafe Hanoi relies on the ‘humble-special’ nature of a raw/cooked dialectic, in order to deliver a richness of space from a modest budget deployed amidst real dilapidation. The furniture illustrated this approach: sourced from second-hand shops, the mismatched forms of the chairs are unified by a single blood-red palette.

The chairs were cheap, but we took five weeks and a dozen samples to get the red right. Similarly, the simple oak tabletops are not encased in polyurethane, but shellacked and hand-oiled to develop richness, depth and tactility in the timber.

Photographer Anna Kidman