In Seville, ENEI transforms a former bank branch into Artica — an open café and ice cream shop where a once fragmented interior becomes a continuous space for gathering beneath a luminous sphere.
Artica Sevilla is the third café and ice cream shop designed for the brand. The project occupies the irregular interior of a former bank branch in the suburbs and proposes a material, programmatic, and formal reconfiguration that transforms the spatial experience of the premises. Rather than imposing a completely new structure, the intervention focuses on revealing and reorganizing the latent potential of the existing space.
The project begins with a process of subtraction. All internal partitions were removed and the suspended ceiling taken down, allowing the full height of the space to emerge and creating a larger, continuous volume. This gesture clarifies the geometry of the interior and shifts the previously segmented, office-like layout toward a more open and collective environment.
At the centre of the space hangs its most distinctive feature: a large spherical light fixture that acts as both a visual landmark and a spatial anchor. Suspended above the main entrance, the glowing sphere immediately captures attention upon arrival and organizes the interior around it. Below, a series of simple furnishings — timber tables, metal stools, and a long counter — invite occupation without dictating how.
The material palette leans warm and restrained: plaster walls, exposed concrete, polished cement floors, and touches of pale timber. Together they create a neutral envelope that lets the products and the social life of the café take the foreground. Natural light enters from large existing windows, softened by the depth of the former bank's walls, producing a calm interior that runs counter to the Sevillian heat outside.
What ENEI achieves here is less a design statement than a spatial argument: that the most generous interiors are often produced not by addition but by careful removal — by trusting what the existing structure can already offer once it is freed from subdivision.
