Ice Cream Parlors That Lick the Heat in Style
Edgewood Creamery
A walkable stretch of Oxmoor Road in Homewood, Alabama, marks the heart of the city’s Edgewood neighborhood. Five-year-old Edgewood Creamery completes the charming scene, programmatically speaking, but it boasts an otherwise new-fashioned aesthetic by Appleseed Workshop. The Birmingham, Alabama–based design-build studio converted a former salon space into the progressive ice-cream parlor, by employing 1,200 spruce studs to reinvent the geometry of the interior.
Serendipity
Located within the Boca Raton Resort & Club—which originally opened in 1926 as The Cloister Inn—Serendipity opened in 2008 as part of a dramatic modernization of the overall property begun three years earlier. González Architects adapted the Tiffany lamp–studded ceiling and other signatures of New York’s Serendipity 3 to the sub-tropical setting.
Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream
Established in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint in 2008, Van Leeuwen Artisan Ice Cream began with two trucks dashing between the production facility and the surrounding neighborhood. The company has since grown to comprise a six-vehicle fleet and three stores. The two-year-old Boerum Hill store shown here is the second of the trio, and a collaboration between the company’s three cofounders and fellow Brooklynite Joseph Foglia Designs.
Coolhaus
Architectural Record first featured Natasha Case and Freya Estrella’s burgeoning ice-cream empire Coolhaus as a Great Recession–inspired alternative to traditional architectural practice. A bricks-and-mortar location in Culver City, for which they tapped Design, Bitches, shows that the cofounders’ design savvy isn’t limited to beloved ice cream sandwiches. The 2011 project reflects the southern California urban milieu without outshining the product.
Chin Chin Labs
In London’s Camden Town since 2010, Chin Chin Labs has conjured patrons’ ice-cream visions into reality with liquid nitrogen. To visualize the process, Shai Akram & Andrew Haythornthwaite Design Studio divided the Chin Chin store into decanting, mixing, freezing, and topping workstations. All are connected by structural pipes-cum-electrical conduit, which impart the space with the quality of a molecular diagram.
Dri Dri
In 2011 the Front Room at St Martins Lane Hotel hosted a temporary installation that gelato company Dri Dri commissioned from elips design. The London design studio created demountable, largely two-dimensional elements to evoke a sunny coastline, and it redeployed many of those pieces for another pop-up shop at Kensington Mall in 2012. A permanent Dri Dri is located at Chelsea Farmer’s Market.
Sprinkles Ice Cream
Sprinkles first gained fame in 2005 as a cupcake bakery, and it expanded into the ice cream business in 2012 with a Beverly Hills store designed entirely—from the exterior’s logoform and laser-cut shade screen to the white Corian interior—by a l m project. The Los Angeles studio had been tapped for the brand’s original launch right next door.
The Fabulous Frozen Factory
This newly opened venture in Monterrey, Mexico, uses liquid nitrogen to freeze customers’ treats before their eyes, so local designer Jakob Gómez opted for an industrial aesthetic that enhanced visitors’ sense of participating in the making experience. A Corian workstation sets apart the work area, and tubular stainless steel and fairground-style graphics are configured to delineate the four stages of preparation.
Diplom
The Oslo-based architecture firm Scenario worked with a branding agency to conceive the backstory of this year-old shop in nearby Akershus. In it, the character Eskimonika releases a plume of flavors from underneath the North Pole, which spreads from the store’s central columns onto its mountainous ceiling. Other features, like a wood ramp that elevates children to counter height, lend functionality to the uniquely Norwegian narrative.
Izzy’s Ice Cream
Lara Hammel and Jeff Sommers opened Izzy’s in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 2000, and have embraced innovation throughout their cool career. The husband and wife use a scoop of their own invention, digitally notify customers when favorite flavors enter the freezer, and invest in renewable energy. Their latest forward-thinking accomplishment: opening a new store this week in Minneapolis designed by David Salmela.
Salt & Straw
This Portland, Oregon, farm-to-cone maker graduated from cart to reclaimed fir and vintage library shelving in 2011, thanks to a shop on Alberta Street conceived by architect John Cooley, interior designer Sarah Littlefield, and builder Hammer & Hand. The team reconvened the following year to realize a second location, an adaptive reuse of a former movie theater in Northwest Portland.
Ice cream won’t solve global warming, but the sweet stuff can offer personal relief from the grips of a fiery summer day. Served in a thoughtfully conceived retail environment, a scoop of ice cream may even offer design inspiration. We went in search of such dessert oases on two continents. The journey revealed several parallel vernaculars within the project type, which range from artisanal to mad-scientist to whimsical. Click the image above to view a slide show.