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| A corner of Giay Café - Photo: Thanh Hang |
As its name points out, almost every piece of furniture and all the decorations in Giay (Paper) Cafe are made from recycled paper and cardboard. The three-story coffee shop by the Nhieu Loc Canal can’t be missed with a floor to ceiling window showing the huge word COFFEE made from paper.
Visitors to the coffee shop will be amazed that paper was not only used to make the furniture, but literally used to construct layout on the first floor. There is a whole room that is walled by thousands pieces of paper. The shoe shelf outside the door leading into the air-conditioned room is also made from cardboard.
However, the most astonishing things are the many chairs and coffee tables in different shapes on the second floor – which is the main floor of the coffee shop. According to Nguyen Van Dung, a member of the group that designed the coffee shop, these chairs can hold up to 300 kilograms, depending on the chair. These chairs are constructed mainly from cardboard spools, cardboard and cloth.
Nguyen Van Dung, Truong Quynh Anh and Nguyen Le Thanh Nam were the three members of the designing team. All in their early twenties they came up with the idea to use recycled materials when Dung’s older brother asked him to design a coffee shop that was both cheap and unique. They had collected and experimented with many materials before choosing paper and paper spools. It took them two months to make the café once they had the idea.
Nguyen Van Dung told the Daily, “I have been interested in the environment and recycling for a long time. I have been making stuff from the things we threw away since I was a kid. So the ideas of a paper coffee shop came to me naturally.”
