I IN suspends lantern-inspired Blue Lantern over first Blue Bottle cafe in Bangkok

A 178-square-metre cafe in Bangkok carries a single sculptural gesture: a large Blue Lantern installation extending from the ceiling above the drip station at the first Blue Bottle Coffee location in the Thai capital.

Japanese studio I IN designed the interior, drawing on traditional Thai festivals in which thousands of paper lanterns are released into the sky. The installation hangs directly above the coffee counter, at the point where customers first enter the space.

"The main idea came from Thailand's traditional lantern festival," I IN co-founder Yohei Terui told Dezeen. "We wanted to capture the feeling of a lantern floating in the sky and bring that into the space in a contemporary way."

"This became what we call the Blue Lantern, a large sculptural element extending from the ceiling above the drip station," Terui continued.

Why a lantern, and why at the entrance?

Because the project marks the brand's Bangkok debut, the studio wanted a "bold and dramatic" space that would also nod to local culture. The lantern serves both purposes.

"The lantern idea came from the local culture, and from the beginning, we wanted to make it as large and impactful as possible," Terui said. "We placed it at the location where customers first enter the cafe, so it would immediately catch their attention and become a symbol of the store."

For practitioners, the move demonstrates how a cultural reference can double as wayfinding and brand signage. One installation does the work of three.

What role does teak play?

The furniture and fixtures were made from teak wood, a material often avoided in the West due to concerns about illegal logging but native to Thailand. The choice reverses a common export-market assumption about what counts as responsible material specification.

"Every country has their own approach to natural materials, depending on what is locally available and traditionally used," Terui said. "In Thailand, especially in the north, teak is a very familiar material and commonly used in the interiors and architecture."

How do blue and gold work together?

The cafe is drenched in blue hues. The brand's signature colour covers the lantern and the coffee counter, while a pale blue wraps the rest of the space.

I IN chose the paler tone to "give guests a sense of brand identity and the feeling of a sky," Terui explained. The blue ceiling plane reads as atmosphere; the lantern reads as object.

Gold details entered the scheme after Terui walked the city himself.

"The idea of bringing gold into the interior actually came from my personal experience of walking around Bangkok," Terui said. "As you walk through the city, you suddenly come across these beautiful, strong gold colours, and I found this contrast very unique."

"It was something that stayed in my memory of Bangkok, and I wanted to bring a little of that feeling into the cafe," he continued.

I IN has recently completed two other retail interiors in Asia: the concrete Andersson Bell store in Tokyo and the Human Made store in Seoul, clad in handcrafted Korean celadon tiles. The Bangkok cafe extends a pattern in which the studio grounds global brand identities in locally specific materials and memory, a method other firms working across Asian markets may soon find clients asking for by name.

By Marcus Bennett