All-weather outdoor dining

An award-winning structure from Baytex of Mount Maunganui, New Zealand, is helping one cafe overcome the downsides of eating alfresco.

The client for this project wanted to offer guests a protected, all-weather dining option in the outdoor area of a cafe in a newly developed supermarket complex in Wellington, N.Z.

“This meant that the client was looking for an ‘open-air’ feeling during those warm summer days, whilst providing good sun protection as well as being able to cater to the other end of the weather spectrum: the wet and windy winter weather systems that the capital city is famous for,” says Baytex’s operations manager Andrew Lingman.

Design-wise, the client desired a unique dining environment with a linear aesthetic (flat around the outside rather than traditional arch-shaped canopies) in keeping with the low-pitch aesthetic of the building to which the canopy would attach.

Baytex proposed a robust framework and canopy design that was essentially flat. The “flatness” of the design was offset by the new Baytex Cloud Canopy system, a single-bolt tensioning system that pushes up the canopy’s arched purlins into the roof fabric to give a drum-tight finish, with the arched purlins creating a cloud-like look.

The result is a fully engineered 7.5-by-4-meter canopy structure on 2.4-meter legs that features a solid, linear framework, cloud-like PVC contours and clear roller-screens walls.

“The roller walls, a gear-box-wound Acmeda Zipscreen system with clear PVC, really complement the overall look and functionality of the canopy and nail the ‘protected, all-weather dining’ brief,” Lingman says.

A division of Structurflex Ltd., Baytex received an Award of Excellence 2016 for this project from the Outdoor Fabric Products Association of New Zealand.

“The outside part of the cafe has created a lot of favorable comments due to its innovative design, which provides a great space for our customers to enjoy their coffee and food,” says cafe owner Chanden Cheav.