micromarket

In April 2022, Zdeňka and Zdeněk approached us with a vision of opening their first place of their own, a “market hall” where you could have a coffee, buy fresh and pantry foods, and have something prepared to eat from the very same ingredients.

Where? In a retail park in Štěrboholy. How quickly? As quickly as possible, it was supposed to open in the summer. For how much? It was a pilot project, so who knew, but it could not be too expensive.

Turning a standard retail “box” into a refined market hall is no easy task. Fortunately, our team included the unstoppable client Zdenka, Tonda, a skilled carpenter faster than IKEA, and Mr Janoušek, who was a manufacturer, lighting designer and electrician all in one.

We began by stripping away the accumulated layers: the wood-effect floor tiles were replaced with a terracotta grid, while the walls, ceiling and ventilation ducts were painted white. This revealed some unexpected qualities of the space, including plenty of daylight from two sides and an impressive clear height of almost seven metres, even though restrictions prevented us from making full use of it.

Together with Mr Janoušek, we removed the old cables and trunking, and into this newly cleared void came a “sky of lights”, made from opal glass globes suspended from a web of red ropes.

Then it was Tonda the carpenter’s turn. Following our design for a modular, tectonic “urbanism of shelving”, he produced the furniture from spruce battens, pine plywood and coloured MDF.

And us? We answered the phones, designed on the fly and tried to keep moving along the thin line between a reasonable compromise and the complete collapse of the design.

It was quite a ride, and even we were surprised by the result. This was not a project built “according to the design”, but rather the physical outcome of a process in which we ourselves played only one part.

The planned early-summer opening did not happen. It was only as the sun began to dip lower in the Indian summer that we finally visited the newly opened Mikrotržnice. Something was crooked here, something did not quite fit there, and here and there we had failed to think something through.

Yet in the end, on the edge of a generic retail park, a cosy and distinctive space emerged, with rough, crafted detailing whose role is to play second fiddle to the food. And indeed, the products, the space and the furniture all merge into a single feeling: “I’m in the mood for something.”