Conceived by UTLT in collaboration with studio danielak, Łyk is a 130-square-metre neobistro in the historic Garbary district of Poznań that reconsiders hospitality as an act of urban culture. By embracing the building’s industrial past, the project preserves its unfinished material language, allowing century-old steel beams, exposed brick masonry and polished concrete floors to coexist with restrained interventions in stainless steel, bespoke lighting and works by local artists. The new does not compete with the old but enters into a measured dialogue with it, allowing the existing fabric to retain both its character and its memory. Conceived as an authentic third place, Łyk transforms an industrial shell into a generous social interior that mediates between the domestic and the civic, celebrating the work of a new generation of Polish designers, makers and artists while reaffirming craftsmanship as both cultural practice and collective endeavour.
Cities are remembered not only through their monuments but through the ordinary interiors where everyday life unfolds. Cafés, bookstores, neighbourhood restaurants and bars have long constituted the social infrastructure of European urbanity, spaces where public life acquires intimacy and private rituals become collective experiences. In Poznań—a city whose identity has been shaped by an increasingly vibrant creative scene—Łyk inserts itself within this lineage, proposing hospitality as cultural production.
Opened in 2025 at 58 Garbary Street, the 130-square-metre neobistro unfolds as a sequence of atmospheres rather than a singular dining room. A luminous front space hosts breakfast gatherings, remote work and informal encounters over specialty coffee and freshly baked pastries. As daylight fades, the interior quietly transforms into an evening destination for natural wines and sharing plates, where conviviality takes precedence over individual consumption.
Rather than prescribing a single mode of occupation, the architecture accommodates shifting rhythms throughout the day, allowing time itself to become a design material and everyday rituals to continually reshape the character of the space.
The project is operated by three partners united by a shared commitment to gastronomy, coffee culture and locality. Their ambition extends beyond creating another destination venue.
Instead, Łyk is conceived as an authentic, unpretentious third place—a space belonging neither to the domestic sphere nor to the workplace, but to the city itself.
The concept inevitably recalls Ray Oldenburg’s influential formulation of the third place in The Great Good Place (1989), where informal gathering spaces are described as essential infrastructures of democratic life. Situated between home and work, these environments cultivate conversation, familiarity and civic belonging through repeated encounters. Here, architecture does not simply provide a backdrop for social interaction; it actively participates in its construction.
In this sense, Łyk belongs to a broader architectural tradition in which interiors become social condensers. The café becomes neither domestic living room nor commercial venue alone, but an intermediary civic interior—a threshold where urban life rehearses itself.
Such questions acquire particular significance in contemporary Poznań. Historically one of Poland’s principal commercial centres, the city has developed into an important cultural and educational hub, supported by institutions such as Adam Mickiewicz University, the annual Malta Festival and a flourishing community of independent galleries, design studios and craft workshops. Within this ecosystem, hospitality increasingly operates as a platform for cultural exchange, where food, design, art and public life intersect. Łyk positions itself precisely within this emerging ecology of creative production, extending the city’s cultural landscape.
The design begins with an act of restraint. Instead of concealing the building’s industrial origins, UTLT and studio danielak reveal them with remarkable precision. Original brick masonry, century-old steel structural members and polished concrete floors remain exposed, their weathered surfaces bearing the accumulated memory of occupation. Contemporary insertions are deliberately restrained: stainless steel, finely detailed joinery and bespoke lighting appear not as contrasting objects but as carefully calibrated additions that complete rather than overwrite the existing architecture.
This attitude reflects a broader understanding of adaptive reuse as an ethical practice where material authenticity becomes both aesthetic language and cultural position.
The result is an atmosphere that feels remarkably inevitable, as though the intervention had simply uncovered qualities already latent within the building.
Craftsmanship occupies an equally central role. The bar joinery and wall cladding were produced under the UTLT brand, bringing together the studio’s design research with the expertise of carefully selected local workshops. The steel structure was fabricated by master locksmith Tomasz Szyca, while the timber components were realised by Stolarnia Korach, exemplifying a collaborative process in which design emerges through dialogue with manufacturing. The proprietary construction methods developed for this project have since informed UTLT’s production of bespoke steel kitchens, demonstrating how architectural experimentation can generate transferable knowledge across scales.
The interior further embeds itself within Poznań’s cultural milieu through the inclusion of works by local artist Olga Mularczyk and sculptor Aleksander Kienitz, while the sculptural luminaire suspended above the bar was designed by Warsaw-based Dérive Studio. Throughout the day, carefully orchestrated lighting recalibrates the perception of the space, allowing its material palette to shift from bright and tactile to intimate and atmospheric without altering its essential character.
Furniture selections continue this dialogue between contemporary Polish design and international classics.
Deep red seating introduces the project’s only chromatic intensity, lending warmth to an otherwise restrained palette of brick, concrete and steel. A metal table by The Good Living & Co. coexists effortlessly with Achille Castiglioni and Pio Manzù’s Parentesi and Achille Castiglioni’s Frisbi lamps for Flos, establishing a conversation between emerging local production and twentieth-century design.
Between the intimacy of the home and the anonymity of the city, Łyk constructs a space where architecture becomes a medium for encounter, conversation and cultural exchange. In an era increasingly characterised by digital interaction and fragmented urban experience, such places remind us that the social life of cities still depends on physical environments capable of sustaining everyday rituals of togetherness. Here, architecture performs its quietest yet perhaps most enduring role: not simply shaping space, but cultivating community.
Facts & Credits
Project title Neobistro Łyk
Typology Interiors, Bistro, Bar
Location Garbary 58, Poznań, Poland
Area 130 m²
Status Completed, 2025
Interior design UTLT studio
Collaborator studio.danielak
Photography Migdał Studio