MYFLOW Kostanay

MYFLOW Café is located in Kostanay, a small city in northern Kazakhstan, with a population of 250,000. The founders of the institution wanted to create an urban café that would attract the citizens, change their daily habits, introduce them to early breakfasts with quality coffee every day, and thus generally contribute to the development of the restaurant culture in the city.

As Kostanay is an industrial city with well-developed agricultural and engineering industries, the UP2DATE architects studio suggested the idea of a kind of oasis - a cafe with a light and sunny interior, where one can come and relax from all the bustle of the city.

In the centre of the café there is an island with a coffee bar and a shop window with confectionery. Around this island the whole seating area is laid out, divided into three types - standard seating, lounge seating with low coffee tables, and places for quick meals.

The interior uses fairly simple solutions in the finishes - concrete floors, decorative plaster, marble from the local quarry, ceramics and metal. The concrete floors are combined with Breccia marble tiles. Decorative plaster is applied to all walls and ceilings and painted in the same colour. Metalwork adds a certain brutality to the design.

Despite all the simplicity of the finishes, the architects have put the main emphasis on structural solutions and sophisticated knots. In the interior there are arches with smooth edges as a reference to the architecture of Central Asia, a suspended ceiling made of plasterboard with thin edges and large massive columns that create a rhythm around the windows, as well as masking the utility lines in the hall. The elongated shape of the columns is also evident in the other details of the interior. The architects requested cylindrical light fittings at the central tables to repeat the vertical rhythm. The rest of the lighting is spherical and cone-shaped. A large number of plants complements the whole interior, creating an oasis-like experience.