Emerald green walls and rippling rose gold ceilings feature inside Bar Lotus in Shanghai designed by Office AIO, which transitions from a coffee shop by day into a cocktail bar at night.
Situated on the sycamore tree-lined neighbourhood of Jing'an in Shanghai, Bar Lotus can be found at the end of a 100-metre-long monolithic block of single-storey concrete buildings that house various restaurants and bars.

The Beijing-based practice was initially asked to design a space solely to be a cocktail bar, but was soon tasked with incorporating a cafe to operate in the same space during daytime.
Office AIO founders Timothy Kwan and Isabelle Sun designed the cafe-cum-cocktail bar within a 130 square-metre building made up of two staggered rectangular volumes, which were formerly part of a larger restaurant and had no openings on the street-facing facade. The designers created an entrance on this street-facing facade that leads to a long corridor. This long arched hallway divides the interior spaces into two main parts acting as a connecting space for the two rooms.

White perforated steel panels line the interior of the central hallway, giving the space a "sense of enclosure" while still allowing some of the sounds, lights and smells from each adjoining room to pass through.
Sliding mirrored walls cover the arched entrances to the cocktail bar ? these are kept closed during the day to act as "invisible divisions" to separate off the bar area, reflecting the s...