Sadhu Lotte

Sadhu is a vegetarian buffet restaurant with several branches. For its branch on the third floor of a large shopping mall, the design team completed in 2023 a dim, warm interior that has little in common with the bright, polished mall around it.

The plan is a T. A narrow front faces the mall corridor, and behind it the dining room opens into two long wings. The architects divided this space with rows of thick arches, so it reads as a sequence of vaulted bays and long galleries rather than one open hall. Low, focused light falls on the floor and leaves the ceilings in shadow, and the arcades lead the eye to small lit niches at their far ends.

Almost every surface is made by hand from clay. The team worked with a pottery workshop to produce terracotta pieces, round discs and small fragments, which craftsmen then laid one by one into the floors in patterns that read like rugs. Old roof tiles were collected and set into the vaults and walls, finished in rough, earth-coloured plaster. Bands of glazed teal tile run along the base of the arches.

The shopfront follows the same logic. A canopy of traditional curved roof tiles, carried on timber brackets, runs along the top of the facade, and the entrance wall around the restaurant’s name is built up from stacked old tiles and bricks.

Inside a mall built for passing through, the restaurant asks diners to slow down and stay a while, in a room whose surfaces still show the hands that made them.