Project Name: GODIVA Bakery Godipan Kyoto Shijo

Location: Kyoto, Japan

Design Team: Torafu Architects

Floor Area: 101.1 m²

Year of Completion: 2025

Photography: Kenta Hasegawa

Design Features: Tokyo-based practice Torafu Architects has completed GODIVA Bakery Godipan Kyoto Shijo, a compact retail bakery for the Belgian chocolate brand GODIVA, positioned adjacent to the historic Nishiki Market in central Kyoto. The 101-square-metre shop translates the spatial language of the Tokyo flagship in Yurakucho into a response specific to Kyoto’s layered urban fabric, distilling the brand’s guiding concept — a neighbourhood bakery meets GODIVA — into a space that feels simultaneously festive and rooted in the everyday.

Torafu’s defining move is the façade, which mediates between the historic streetscape and the commercial interior. A gently rounded fabric awning, wooden joinery, and illustrated graphics compose an approachable street presence that draws pedestrians in without disrupting the continuity of the surrounding architecture. Large openings dissolve the boundary between street and interior, making the display of bread and the warmth of the space visible from the pavement.

Inside, a continuous curved counter unifies ambient display, refrigerated goods, and the cashier into a single piece of furniture that guides circulation through the compact plan. The counter’s soft profile, echoed in the curved ceiling above, draws its formal cue from GODIVA’s signature chocolate cornet — a quiet brand reference translated into architecture. Warm reddish tones throughout the interior resonate with the heavy brick of the exterior, building a material coherence that reads as inviting from the street.

At the rear, a carefully framed opening into the production zone allows glimpses of bread and chocolate being made, lending the space a sense of depth and authenticity. The result is a shop that belongs to its neighbourhood while carrying the precise craft of both GODIVA and Torafu Architects.

Design Team: Founded in 2004 by Koichi Suzuno and Shinya Kamuro, Torafu Architects is a Tokyo-based practice whose work spans architecture, interior design, exhibition design, product design, and spatial installation. Rooted in architectural thinking, the office approaches each project as an opportunity to reconsider the relationship between space, material, and human behaviour, producing work that is formally precise yet perceptually warm.

Torafu’s portfolio ranges from retail and hospitality interiors to residential architecture, public installations, and industrial design objects. Among their most recognised works are Template in Claska, Nike 1Love, Air Vessel, and Gulliver Table. Air Vessel entered the permanent collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2015, underscoring the office’s capacity to work fluidly across scales and disciplines. The firm has received numerous distinctions including the Red Dot Best of the Best, iF Design Award, Good Design Award, and the Elita Design Award Grand Prize at Milan Salone 2011.

Beyond practice, both principals maintain active teaching engagements across leading Japanese universities. Suzuno currently holds positions at Ritsumeikan University and Tokyo University of the Arts, while Kamuro has lectured at Showa Women’s University. Their dual commitment to built work and architectural education reinforces a practice culture grounded in inquiry and craft.