Fueling the fire- don't rule out dark ceilings

Now that my radar is set to showing you how dark ceilings can be a viable solution, I just remembered another example I collected eons ago.

Whenever I went to visit my friend Amy in San Francisco (just a hop skip and a jump from me in Oakland), we inevitably ended up at this one little eatery below her apartment.

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The brand new Mission Bay life sciences campus where she lived is all concrete and hard edges. While some see the minimalist architecture as beautiful and elegant, I found it all too sterile.

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To be fair, the campus is still very much under construction, and softscaping is in the works. Anyways, I digress.

Students and their families living in the housing developments above could stroll down for a quick bite to eat before disappearing into their labs and office spaces.

 Peasant Pies is one of those eateries. (quite yummy, btw) The retail spaces are delivered to tenants in
“cold shell” condition, aka completely empty with concrete walls, ceiling and floor.  So, it's up to each retailer to personalize their space.

The first thing I noticed when entering this shop was the brown ceilings. Can you imagine what this space must have looked like before color was added? Just a big blank box, waiting for it's personality.

Darker ceilings work especially well in industrial buildings like this, where you have high ceilings, often with exposed duct work and so forth. It creates a sense of intimacy where otherwise there would be a sterile over-sized space. The stained concrete floor is nice, too.

I'd like to go back and snap pictures of the other retail shops flanking Peasant Pies to see what they did with their ceilings...