Milky’s, a Toronto café, officially opened its second location, Cloud Room, designed and built in a shipping container by newly founded Full Fat Studio.

The café—part of the city’s Stackt Market—was developed from the architectural language and graphic patterning created by Batay-Csorba Architects. Milky’s Cloud Room achieves a familiar, yet new feeling. Changes in material, colour, pattern, and details create two distinct spaces.

Cloud Room earns its name from moving light that collects shadows in the three-dimensional travertine pattern covering the walls and ceiling. The effect mimics the shadows of moving clouds across the wall. Light moves at a slow pace; imperceptible when stared at, but noticeable over the time it takes to order and make a coffee.

The entire interior was custom-designed and fabricated to outfit the interior of a container. The travertine walls and ceiling were machine-sculpted by Marbela. Anony, a lighting manufacturer in Toronto, designed intelligent light fixtures to control the ambiance and create the cloud effect. Other fixtures, such as fibre-optic counter lights, were customized to suit the space. A miniature-sized herringbone wood from Relative Space covers the floor.

“We wanted the second location to be distinctly Milky’s, while having its own personality. Slow coffee was an appealing concept, so we started thinking about how to create a space for slowness,” said Fraser Greenberg, founder of Milky’s and partner at Full Fat Design. “Stone was our material choice because of its age and solemness. Clouds were our concept because of their speed and unpredictability.”