Spacon & X turned a 1930s Copenhagen meatpacking hall into Folk Kombucha's brewery

A listed 1930s building had to house kombucha production, a laboratory, offices and a mezzanine for workshops and social events, without erasing the district's character.

Spacon & X preserved the archetypal white-tile walls and mustard-yellow and green marble floor tiles, set translucent iridescent panels behind the stainless fermentation tanks, echoed the pipe network with spaghetti-shaped wire lighting, added hand-hammered steel lamps, and pressed lounge tables from plastic packaging salvaged from the site's earlier fish and food-waste production. Artwork made of scoby — the yeast-and-bacteria culture that kickstarts fermentation — decorates the interior.

The brewery opened as Folk Kombucha's factory and social venue in the Meatpacking District, with the mezzanine overlooking production for workshops; Dezeen covered the project in August 2023.

Danish studio Spacon & X designed the Folk Kombucha brewery inside a listed 1930s functionalist building in Copenhagen's Meatpacking District, aiming to balance the building's strong character with its contemporary use. 'Our design team aimed to preserve different layers of unique history,' architect Malene Hvidt told Dezeen.

The studio kept the building's archetypal white-tile walls and its mustard-yellow and green marble floor tiles, and paid tribute to the district's white facades with cobalt-blue windows by choosing cobalt blue as a leading accent, alongside orange and pink. Translucent iridescent panels sit behind the stainless steel fermentation tanks to delineate spaces, and a tangle of steel pipes is echoed in spaghetti-shaped wire lighting; lounge tables and benches are topped with bright blue rubber.

The most circular gesture: Spacon & X created lounge tables by recycling plastic packaging salvaged from the fish and other food waste industrially produced at the site before it became the brewery — 'instead of throwing out this long-lasting hygienic material, we transformed it into unique custom-made tables'. Alongside bespoke hand-hammered steel lamps, artwork made of scoby, the culture that kickstarts kombucha fermentation, decorates the space.

Preserving tiles and marble kept the listed building's history instead of gutting it.

Cobalt blue ties the interior to the Meatpacking District's signature painted window frames.

Tables pressed from the site's own plastic waste close the loop physically, not rhetorically.

Scoby artwork makes the product's actual fermentation culture part of the decor.

A production floor can be the brand tour: when the building's waste becomes the furniture and the culture becomes the art, the process sells itself.

The multipurpose building also houses offices, a separate lounge, a laboratory and storage areas, with a mezzanine overlooking production used for workshops and other social events.