Some food spaces aren’t about food preparation or presentation, they’re actually inspired by food. When I was a third year architecture student, a professor kept comparing a studiomate’s project to Swiss cheese. So after several iterations the professor still wasn’t happy with, my studiomate built a model out of a block of cheese she purchased from an absurd grocery store named Jungle Jim’s. We all laughed about her semi-sanitary model, but there was something compelling about the porosity of cheese in the first place. There are large buildings like the Rolex Learning Center that look almost as if the architects set out to build a giant slice of cheese, even if most architects cringe at the suggestion that Sanaa would ever do such at a thing.

But some other folks have done such a thing, and done it quite well. The architect here is Kotaro Horiuchi who has offices in both France and Japan. The space here inspired by cheese is – get this – a Parisian cheese boutique Salon du Fromage. The sculpted interior looks exceedingly clean and the porous lighting fixtures cast irregular shadows across the sufaces of boutique, adding to their apparent depth. Like the lighting fixtures, the furniture is custom. I don’t know enough about cheesemongering to know if this place of business makes business sense, but it’s a stunning place to show off cheese, so let’s hope they make some cheddar.