Designer Jeonghwa Seo furnishes a café and wine bar with aluminium and brass

Seoul-based designer Jeonghwa Seo has once again proved that creativity knows no bound by furnishing a café and wine bar with an unfinished quality of cast aluminium, oak, and brass. Infusing a theme like furniture that celebrates the qualities of raw materials, Jeonghwa has custom-made the space of Et Cetera in Seoul that features a raw concrete interior.

Seo said, “The most important aspect of this project was to show the pure quality of the materials. I wanted to create a space where people can experience them.”

Cast aluminium, welded into elongated and elliptical shape, has been used as a base for larger pieces of furniture. To add a further twist, the welding join-lines have not been ground down so can show off the making process.

"I have been using aluminium throughout my previous works because cast aluminium is light, cost-effective, and can be 100 per cent recycled," said Seo. "It can also be welded without its shape changing in the heat."

Oak has been used for the seats and finishes on the chairs and tables, while brass mainly used for the lighting. The café interior has also made good use of glass as well.

"In order to express the theme of 'continuity of space', a bench, lights, and stones are installed to express movement through space which is divided only by glass," explained Seo.

To highlight the raw feel of the space, lighting has been done very smartly. Wall lamps and floor lamps are designed to maximise the textures of the area and placed strategically so that the light flows on the surface of materials.

"Et Cetera is a space where crafts, coffee, and wine are sold together," explained Seo. "The clients asked that the entire space can be transformed flexibly, except for the table for eight people."

While a towering wine rack is constructed from old wine crates built into the wall, bar counters and stools have come straight from Seo’s existing work, taking an elliptical form.

I wanted to build the tower of wine boxes with wood, brick, and muds in a rather primitive way," said Seo. "I constructed it myself. The taste of wine is closely related with time, so I wanted to make a wine tower that seemed to have been built a long time ago."