The Daily Ritual: Finding Stillness in Beijing’s SanYuanLi Market

Nestled within Beijing’s SanYuanLi Food Market, this compact café is shaped as profoundly by its context as by the rhythms of daily life. Unlike traditional wet markets, SanYuanLi caters to a diverse residential community and sits at the crossroads of the city’s diplomatic quarter and the hotel-lined banks of the Liangma River. This unique setting imbues the market with a character that is at once intensely local and subtly cosmopolitan, creating an atmosphere rich with movement, interaction, and daily ritual.

Positioned at the market’s northern entrance, the café stands at a vital threshold. One façade engages the street, while the other establishes the first retail encounter within the market, naturally attracting passers-by. Despite its modest 25-square-metre footprint, the café serves as a distinct urban node. It is compact in size, yet remarkably prominent within the daily choreography of the market.

Inspired by Colin Rowe’s concept of contextualism in Collage City, the project contemplates the city as a tapestry of intertwined histories rather than a linear narrative. In many modern developments, incremental urban renewal has inadvertently diminished the vibrancy of street life, replacing authentic complexity with neutral, impersonal norms. Traditional markets, once vibrant vessels of collective memory, have been especially susceptible to this erosion.

This project aspires to renew the connection between street, community, and public life. Rather than positioning the café as an isolated entity, B.L.U.E Architecture embraces a dual approach: forging a distinct spatial identity while remaining deeply anchored in the market’s everyday logic. The goal is not to idealise the past, but to enable memory, routine, and contemporary function to coexist harmoniously.

Uniqueness: Reintroducing Energy into the Everyday

SanYuanLi Market reveals a quiet sophistication beneath its informal exterior, a quality reflected in Grid Coffee’s stand-and-sip culture and its generous coffee experience. The café’s entrance façade responds with a purposefully unrefined yet carefully composed design. Cast concrete elements frame transient moments of pause: people stopping, leaning, drinking, transforming everyday actions into a living tableau. Against this substantial backdrop, a handcrafted copper door adds warmth and tactility, asserting its presence without dominating the vibrant market environment.

On the market-facing façade, the selling window is both functional and performative. Its custom opening mechanism transforms each purchase into a meaningful interaction. When closed, the hand-hammered copper surface resembles a work of art, maintaining a quiet presence amidst the surrounding activity.

Inside, the spatial experience is carefully orchestrated. A sculptural bar delineates two distinct yet interconnected zones: ordering and standing. Its precise geometry lends clarity to the compact layout, while recessed niches and angled surfaces accommodate varied uses with understated elegance. The ritual of coffee, brief, upright, and attentive, is afforded dignity and focus, elevating the ordinary to the exceptional.

Everyday Sensibility: Extending the Market’s Logic

Instead of importing foreign concepts, the design absorbs and reinterprets the market’s inherent rhythms. SanYuanLi’s stalls operate with immediacy. Display, storage, and transaction unfold simultaneously within compact footprints. This principle is mirrored in the café’s inner façade, where window-style retail openings foster both visual and social continuity with neighboring vendors, dissolving the boundary between café and market.

Coffee beans are displayed openly at the bar and retail windows, reinforcing a direct, unmediated connection between product and consumer. Hanging price tags, ubiquitous throughout the market, are reinterpreted for the café, allowing prices and offerings to change with the seasons and supply. Solid wood boards, each with unique textures and tones, serve as adaptable markers rather than permanent signage, underscoring the themes of temporality and daily transformation.

Throughout the project, the spirit of the market is not replicated but abstracted. Variations in form and material are secondary to the preservation of atmosphere: movement, negotiation, and familiarity. The outcome is a space that feels truly embedded, not merely inserted, into its context.

Materiality and Craft

Given the limited scale, material restraint is balanced with tactile richness. Concrete, copper, wood, and aggregates are employed sparingly yet expressively, letting texture, patina, and variation shape the visual narrative. Handcraft is central, not as an act of nostalgia, but as a way to align the space with the vibrant imperfection of its surroundings.

The sliding entrance doors consist of 175 oxidized copper squares interwoven with cherry wood fragments, each piece assembled by hand. This intentionally irregular surface resists uniformity, celebrating craftsmanship. At the bar, single-origin coffee beans from Grid Coffee are embedded within the countertop aggregate, establishing a subtle and playful material dialogue between product and surface.

The ribbed concrete façade reveals its aggregate, while elm wood is reserved for surfaces that invite touch, such as backrests and storage tables. The natural patina of the wood imparts warmth and a sense of quiet familiarity.

This project exemplifies how modest interventions can recalibrate the social and spatial energy of a neighborhood. By engaging with memory rather than resisting it, the café transcends its function as a place to drink coffee, becoming a vital connective tissue within the market’s daily life. In this way, it offers a contemporary vision of urban belonging: understated, rooted, and deeply attuned to the realities of everyday living.

This Project is one of the submission from Merci x Sky Design Awards 2026

Company: B.L.U.E. Architecture Studio

Website: www.b-l-u-e.net