A Traveling Hut
The booth design begins with a single shipping plywood crate. It already speaks the language of global transport—the plain, easily built box made to move goods across oceans—and here it simply carries on working once it arrives. In transit it holds the booth's own components and tools; on site it opens out and becomes the furniture: a prep counter, a tasting bar, a place to sit. The vessel that travels with the coffee turns into the spatial elements through which the coffee is served.
Location: NECC, Shanghai, China
Client: Terraform Coffee Roasters
Completion: March 2026
Usage: Cafe Booth Design
Site Area: 18m²
Project Team: Yufan Lu
Photographer: Yufan Lu
The idea grows out of China's coffee festivals. An event like HOTELEX gathers over 3,500 exhibitors under one roof, all working to the same brutal rhythm: build fast, demolish faster. Most booths are KT board—up for a few days, then left behind as waste. The booth designed for Terraform is conceived to relocate rather than to be discarded. The whole structure rests on a lightweight scaffold system that goes up quickly and travels light, and because every member comes apart and goes back together, nothing has to end as waste. It reads less as a finished object than as a system in continuous reassembly, rebuilt each time from its own parts.
None of it is meant to feel cold. The pitched "tiny house" roof brings some warmth back—a domestic register set against the hard machinery of the hall. Stand beneath it and the noise of the fair drops away. It reads as shelter: a silhouette you recognise, a place rather than a stand.
In the end the booth is Terraform's own thinking made spatial. The brand is open about where its coffee comes from and how it reaches you, and the architecture is open in the same way—every component exposed, honest, able to be taken down and carried on. From origin to cup, held within something compact and mobile that can be set down almost anywhere, and still feel like home.
