Upperroom

This central-city pub renovation was driven by a key challenge: refreshing the brand image without erasing the venue's original DNA — its raw, defiant attitude rooted in street culture, particularly graffiti and hip-hop. Rather than washing away the past, the design reinterprets rawness within a contemporary frame. The team chose materials that are heavy, exposed, and unrefined — concrete, plaster, and steel — to preserve an unmistakable underground sensibility. What sets the project apart is how these rough materials are arranged through a system of pattern and rhythm (Order & Rhythm), elevating surfaces that read as coarse, rugged, or even gritty into something tactile, precise, and aesthetically considered. The tension between rawness and refinement becomes the project's signature. On another layer of the design, architectural surfaces serve as canvases for graffiti, deliberately sprayed not as ornament but to embed the language and spirit of street culture directly into the building. Pattern, color, and gestural marks bring life and energy that mirror hip-hop's hard-hitting freedom. The result is architecture that lives between Underground Culture and Contemporary Design — a space that remains raw, cool, and singular, yet refined enough to be read as design. This pub is more than a venue for entertainment; it is a place that channels city culture, music, art, and lifestyle through architecture that is simultaneously rough and beautiful.