Arcade by Hatchery
Beijing, China · Hospitality & Entertainment Design · Concept to Completion
ARCADE by Hatchery is not a restaurant with a bit of entertainment on the side. It's a full experiential destination where food, social interaction, and play come together under one roof and the design makes that distinction felt from the moment you step in. Led by our designer Coro Urdaneta, the project occupies 320 sqm within a newly converted co-living and co-working building in Beijing's CBD , formerly a hotel , and was delivered within a tight budget without any compromise to the ambition of the concept. What emerged is a space that pulses, provokes, and plays.
The Brief
The challenge was both spatial and strategic. The existing kitchen and counter locations were to be retained within the stripped shell, with two separate fast-casual food concepts operating behind them. Beyond the food offer, the space needed to become something genuinely more than a traditional F&B environment, a flexible, day-to-night destination that could serve the building's residents and co-working members as a lively community hub, while simultaneously drawing in the wider business district audience outside. The concept name, ARCADE, set the creative direction from the outset.
Design Concept
The visual language draws from the saturated, slightly anarchic world of 1980s and 90s pop culture — arcade games, comic book illustration, street graphics, and the raw energy of youth culture, rendered at full volume. The palette is uncompromising: an all-black ceiling and exposed structure absorb the room's upper zone into darkness, while below, deep red, electric blue, and white tile grid patterns create a series of distinct zones that crackle with contrast.
Large-scale comic book murals cover entire wall surfaces, black and white illustration bleeding into full-colour graphic panels, giving the space the quality of a scene you've walked into rather than a room you've entered. Graphic icons, lightning bolts, smiley faces, Game Over screens, are woven throughout as both decorative elements and brand signatures. Neon signage organises the space into clear, intuitive zones: Eat, Drink, Enjoy, Play each word a destination in its own right, legible across the room and perfectly pitched to the brand's tone.
Eat, Drink, Enjoy, Play
The Eat zone is the spatial centrepiece, a deeply recessed booth seating area framed by dramatic black arched steel structures, the back wall clad entirely in deep red square tile and backlit by mesh panels glowing red above. Black steel arc lamps with directional spots curve down from the arches, creating an intimate dining atmosphere within a space that is otherwise high-energy. Folding chairs with bold patterned upholstery and white tile-topped communal counters line the perimeter, handling high-volume casual dining with ease.
The Drink zone anchors the bar, a curved counter clad in bold vertical black and white stripe tile, framed by festoon lights and crowned with the Enjoy and Drink neons. Behind it, rough concrete and steel mesh panels carry an eclectic gallery of street art and pop culture imagery, the whole composition sitting somewhere between a dive bar and a curated art installation.
The Play zone delivers on every level, ping-pong tables under an UNSTOPPABLE mesh backdrop bathed in blue-purple light, a vintage arcade machine flashing Game Over, foosball tables, and board games on the dining tables. It transforms the space from restaurant to venue for evening events and activations without a single piece of furniture being moved, the flexibility is designed in, not improvised.
A Space for the Building, and Beyond
Critically, ARCADE was designed to serve two distinct audiences simultaneously. For the business district outside, it functions as an energetic lunch and evening destination with a strong enough identity to draw people in. For the building's residents and co-working members, it offers something rarer, a space with genuine character and community built into it, a place where the day can start with a coffee, continue through a working lunch, and end around a ping-pong table. The two audiences share the same space without friction because the design anticipates both.
Scope of Work
Coro delivered the full interior design across the entire 320 sqm: spatial planning, zone strategy, material and finish specification, bespoke joinery and counter design, lighting design, graphic integration, and furniture curation. The existing kitchen and counter positions were retained and fully reintegrated within the new design, and both fast-casual food concepts were resolved within the operational layout ensuring service flow, kitchen efficiency, and guest circulation worked seamlessly across a space with multiple simultaneous uses, all within a tight budget.