Talaga Sampireun by Seniman Ruang Unifies Sustainable Design Approach & Traditional Indonesian Values

After over a year of quarantine and pandemic shutdowns, the residents’ longing for outdoor experience emerged in big Indonesian cities. As a result, restaurants have adapted from being just a place to eat to a place of domestic escape due to the inability to travel overseas. 

Talaga Sampireun Bekasi aims to offer a natural outdoor dining experience with a new image of Indonesian rural life while retaining its traditional values. The goal was to transform 10.000-square metres of empty land into numerous detached buildings, such as an entrance area, main dining, VIP dining, Saung, kitchen, toilet, and a landscape consisting of greeneries, an artificial lake, agriculture garden, and playground.

The lake is a passive solution to cool down the hot and arid conditions. It is an immense reservoir of rainwater harvesting that can be used to water the plants automatically. Surrounded by 17 floating dining spaces called Saung (a Sundanese hut, usually built as a resting shelter for local farmers), the lake became the main attraction and a new habitat that naturally bred edible fishes for customers and workers. 

The idea was to solve the site condition by implementing Indonesian vernacular architecture. All buildings enable natural cross-ventilation, which minimises reliance on air conditioning. The vast expanse of the roof, inspired by the shape of a banana tree leaf, shades the room from heat and heavy tropical rain. 

A tight budget was the challenge that made all the materials selected carefully to bring timelessness into the design. The project incorporated local, eco-friendly structural materials alongside modern steel structures. Sulawesi coconut wood, which was not commonly used in its place of origin and sold at a low price, was predominantly used as the structure, floor, and wall of Saung. Besides being affordable, rigid, quickly grown and accessible, they also aged beautifully—the older the wood, the bigger the wood fibres appeared, and the more exotic it became. The floor was elevated to avoid termites, and the ceiling was exposed to express wood shingles construction and minimised the budget. Moreover, passive cooling was achieved by allowing air flows under and over the building. 

The design tried to give more than just a sustainable approach and a cultural value. The entrance space was covered in rattan, woven in a modern way as an interpretation of Indonesian Batik fabric. Bricks were exposed and stacked in another Batik pattern as a divider between the kitchen and dining area. Repetitive play of lines from bamboo were embedded in different heights and waving compositions while allowing airflow between their openings. The local vintage tiles, Tegel Kunci, were applied to enhance a focal area of the floor and express modesty. The inexpensive decoration was selected to bring the rural atmosphere to life, such as traditional Indonesian cutleries as decoration and farmers’ hats that were transformed into wall lamps.