Interviews met Departman Architecture

Departman was founded in 2016 by the two of us; Gülşah Kasap Çelik and Rıdvan Çelik and has since grown into a team; it's an interior architecture and design studio based in Kadıköy, Istanbul. Gülşah studied Interior Architecture and Environmental Design at Bahçeşehir University, followed by a master's in UNESCO World Heritage Studies at Brandenburg University of Technology in Germany. Rıdvan trained in painting at Sinop Fine Arts High School and in Interior Architecture at Marmara University's Faculty of Fine Arts, then spent five years as a designer in various interior architecture offices before we started the studio. We work full-scope on residential and commercial interiors; cafés, restaurants, retail, offices and more handling design, execution and in-house furniture production, and our café project Cremma Koşuyolu received a Silver A' Design Award.

For both of us it began with a pull toward making rather than decorating. Rıdvan came from a fine-arts and painting background and spent years drawing fragments of other people's projects in various offices; being one invisible hand in someone else's whole. That pushed him toward independence: a wish to do work he could put himself into and see through in every detail. Gülşah's path ran through interior architecture and then heritage studies, a fascination with how places carry meaning over time. When we met, we began producing together in a workshop, and in 2016 that became Departman. The drive was internal, we wanted to design, not decorate.

Three things guide us. First, one clear idea: every project hangs on a single concept, and every decision has to serve it. Second, context and identity; we look at where a space is and who will use it, and we aim for a strong, unmistakable character achieved with few, well-chosen materials rather than a crowd of them. Third, craft and longevity because we produce our own pieces, we design for how things are actually made and how they will wear. Stylistically we work in what we'd call a "new classicism": we take familiar, often classical elements and rework them into something contemporary, so a space feels rooted and new at once. We use both digital tools and our hands, 3D visualisation to test the concept, and the atelier to prototype and build.

The most exciting phase is the beginning; the research, the learning, narrowing the possibilities, and that moment when a messy problem suddenly resolves into one clear idea. There's real tension in it, the good kind. But the deepest satisfaction comes at the very end, when we stand in the finished space and watch a stranger use it exactly the way we imagined. Because we also build and produce, we get to feel both ends: the thrill of the idea and the quiet reward of seeing it real.

A fine-arts education taught us to imagine in three dimensions and to keep questioning; to want our spaces to make people stop and think, not just look. Heritage studies gave us a long view of how places accumulate meaning and why the historic fabric of a street is worth responding to. Beyond design skills, the ones that matter most are curiosity, patience, and the discipline to edit, to take things away until only what's necessary remains. And running our own atelier taught us that knowing how something is made is as important as knowing how it should look.

We have plans, but what really drives us is to keep moving with pleasure rather than drowning in the pursuit of a single goal; our targets shift constantly through a project; the deeper aim that doesn't change is to catch the spirit of the time. Concretely, we want to grow our in-house furniture line, dept, into a design identity in its own right, and to keep widening the range of things we design

Learn how things are actually made, the biggest gap in young designers is between a beautiful drawing and a buildable one, so close it early. Say yes to small projects and see them all the way to the finished space; you learn more from one built café than from ten unbuilt competition boards. And develop a point of view: the field rewards a clear identity more than technical polish.

Protect the central idea. Most work weakens not from a lack of good elements but from too many of them with no argument between them, the discipline to edit is a pro skill, not a beginner's. Respect context; a space that answers its surroundings ages far better than one that ignores them. And wherever you can, control more of the chain; design and making under one roof loses fewer ideas in the hand-offs that usually kill them

The day opens and closes with a walk; morning and evening, we're out with our dogs, and those walks are when we clear our heads and, often, when ideas quietly settle. In between, our days split between the studio in Kadıköy; concept work, drawings, reviewing renders and time on site or in the atelier, where design meets reality. As two partners running the whole process, there's rarely a clean line between work and life, and the dogs and those walks are part of what keeps the rhythm human

We follow the present closely, we spend hours on design sites, because the more we see, and the more varied it is, the richer our vocabulary becomes. But we don't design for the season. Trends inform us; they don't lead us. Our real inspiration comes from the opposite direction too: wandering ancient cities and spending long hours in them, appreciating the beauty that has survived every intervention. Between the very old and the very current, we try to make work that belongs to its time without being disposable.

Good design has one clear idea and nothing in it that fights that idea. The "aha" moment for us is when a space feels inevitable as if it could not have been otherwise and often when something familiar has been reworked so you read it as recognisable before you realise it's new. Beyond that we look at the fundamentals classical and modern work share, human scale, proportion, symmetry, geometry, balance and at how a thing is detailed and how it will wear. The common mistake to avoid is decorating instead of designing: adding rather than resolving.

Being two partners gives us a simple, decisive rule: at least one of us has to be one hundred percent sure of an idea. If neither of us is fully convinced, we keep developing it or start over and find a new idea until that certainty is there. Beyond that, a design is ready when nothing can be removed without losing something, when subtraction starts to hurt rather than help. In principle a design can always be pushed further, and we do keep an open tab in our minds for earlier work; but there's a point where the concept is fully expressed and further changes would only be noise. Cremma was a rare case: we knew exactly what we wanted and completed it with no revisions at all, a sign the idea was right from the start.

Cremma Koşuyolu. Koşuyolu is a neighbourhood of old, bay-windowed (cumba) houses, and the existing building stood out of step with that fabric. Our idea was to reconcile it with its context, to borrow the language of those old houses and rework it into a contemporary café that belongs to the street again. The client gave us complete freedom, so the biggest challenge was living up to that freedom, taking full responsibility for every decision. We designed the sculptures at concept stage and realised them with artists, worked with engineers on the metal construction, and produced the custom furniture in our own atelier. It's special because it demonstrates the whole studio in one compact space and it earned a Silver A' Design Award.

We're drawn more to periods and places than to single names — classical architecture and its later reworkings, and the ancient cities we visit.

We live and work in Istanbul, a city that has always sat between East and West, old and new, and that tension is a gift for a designer. We both spent our early years in the countryside, close to nature, before moving here, and that mix of the rural and the metropolitan still shapes how we see space. Our culture reaches our work directly, and a respect for the layered and the historic runs through what we design. We believe good design matters for society because well-made, long-lived spaces use resources wisely and give people places worth keeping, the opposite of the disposable interiors that get torn out every few years.

We are Departman's founders, but the studio isn't just the two of us; we work with a team, and our own atelier produces the custom pieces. We keep the studio deliberately hands-on: we don't want to be invisible in our own projects, so we stay close to every detail from concept to production. What we look for in the people and specialists we work with, our team, and the engineers, artists and makers we bring in; is craft and care: people who take responsibility for their part the way we do for ours. The core challenge of the profession is doing justice to trust, a client who hands you their space and their budget is a real responsibility. What can't be forgotten is that we're making places people will actually live in, not photographs.

The way we see our social responsibility is mainly through the work itself: designing for longevity, using few but quality materials, and producing locally so resources aren't wasted.

Winning a Silver A' Design Award for Cremma Koşuyolu gave the studio something rare for a practice our size: an outside, international benchmark for our work. Three benefits stand out. First, recognition; an independent stamp that reaches an audience far beyond our own network. Second, perspective; seeing our work next to international projects sharpens how we judge our own. Third, motivation; it affirmed that our way of working, design and making under one roof, is worth protecting and pushing further.

Cremma Koşuyolu follows the principle that runs through all our work: taking something familiar from tradition and reworking it into something new, so a space feels rooted and surprising at once. The starting point here was the setting itself, Koşuyolu is a neighbourhood of old houses with traditional bay windows (cumba), and the existing building sat awkwardly against that fabric, out of step with its surroundings. So our idea was to reconnect the space to its context: to borrow the language of those old, bay-windowed houses and rework it into a contemporary café that belongs to the street again. Rather than layering on decoration, we built the café around that single idea and carried it through everything; the architecture, the custom furniture, the light so guests feel the concept without needing to name it.

Our main focus was to reconcile the building with its surroundings, to take a structure that stood apart from Koşuyolu's old, bay-windowed houses and give it back a sense of belonging, while still reading as clearly contemporary. We wanted a café with a strong, unmistakable identity that also feels genuinely livable, a place people want to be in, not just photograph with every element serving one concept and holding up to daily use. For us, success meant the concept surviving intact from the first sketch to the last built detail, and the finished café feeling like it had always been part of the street.

We see Cremma's design language as something that can grow beyond a single space. Rather than copying the interior, we'd carry its underlying idea, reworking a place's own architectural context into a contemporary café, into new locations, so each one responds to its own setting while still belonging to the same family. The aim is to let the concept evolve as it travels, not simply repeat it.

The design took around eight weeks. A project of this size would normally take longer, but we knew exactly what we wanted, and the client left the process entirely in our hands. That trust made it one of those rare projects we completed with no revisions at all, a space that expresses our vision fully, exactly as we imagined it.

It was a commissioned project, a café for our client but an unusually open one. The client left the concept entirely to us and trusted us with full control, so it became less a matter of satisfying a brief than of pursuing our own vision without compromise. That freedom is a large part of why the project turned out the way it did.

It's a built café interior realised for our client, not a product for licensing. The custom pieces in it, the furniture and the built elements were designed and produced in our own atelier, dept, which is how we keep the whole space true to a single concept.

We're drawn to hospitality because the footprint is small and every decision is visible, so a weak idea has nowhere to hide. It let us test our approach at full intensity: one concept, carried through architecture and custom furniture alike.

Our influences are less individual designers than periods and places , classical architecture and its later reworkings (Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque), and the ancient cities we spend time in. For Cremma the most direct reference was closer to home: the old bay-windowed (cumba) houses of Koşuyolu itself. Their language of projecting volumes and traditional detailing gave us the vocabulary we reworked into the café.

The everyday specialty-coffee guest, people who come for good coffee and stay because the space rewards being in it.

Two things. First, the approach; our "new classicism," where familiar, classical elements are reworked into something contemporary rather than quoted directly. Second, the fact that the furniture and key elements are custom-made in our own atelier, so the space is built from pieces designed for it, not assembled from a catalogue. Together they give Cremma an identity that's hard to reproduce

he name wasn't ours to invent, Cremma is the brand's own existing name, so it came to us with the project rather than out of the design. Our role was to give that name a spatial identity to match.

We developed the design and visuals in 3ds Max, rendering with V-Ray and Corona, and used the Adobe Creative Cloud mainly Photoshop to grade the final images. We also use an AI-assisted post-processing workflow to refine the lighting and polish of our renders, always without altering the design itself. Alongside the digital tools, the atelier itself was central: prototyping and making the custom pieces by hand.

Cremma looks like it has always been on its street, yet nothing in it is old. The bay window, the cumba every passer-by in Koşuyolu recognises from the neighbourhood's houses has been stripped of its ornament and rebuilt in a contemporary language, so people read it as familiar before they realise it's entirely new. That quiet double-take, a memory of the street rephrased in our own words and finished with furniture made by our own hands, is what makes the space singular: it belongs to its context and stands apart from it at the same time.

At its core the design is the two of us, with our in-house atelier producing the custom pieces. Beyond that, the project brought in specialists where it needed them. We worked with engineers on the metal construction and the structural calculations. And for the more artistic elements; the wall textures and the sculptures we collaborated with artists: we designed the sculptures ourselves at the concept stage, then drew on those artists' support to realise them.

Technology sits on two sides. In design, our visualisation tools let us test the concept precisely before anything is built. In realisation, our own production capability; the atelier is the technology that matters most: it lets us make exactly what the concept needs rather than compromising to what the market offers.

Our research is less statistical than architectural and observational: we study the site and how the business will actually run, and we draw on a long habit of looking at classical architecture and at ancient cities to build a reference base. For Cremma specifically, that meant reading the neighbourhood: studying Koşuyolu's old bay-windowed houses and its historic fabric, and understanding how the existing building failed to fit them, so the design could respond to its context rather than ignore it.

Interestingly, the biggest challenge wasn't a technical one. Because the client gave us complete freedom, the real challenge was living up to that freedom taking full responsibility for every decision, with no brief to hide behind, and making sure the result justified the trust we'd been given. Alongside that were the familiar demands of any café of this kind: reconciling the building with its historic surroundings, and getting the handcrafted, custom elements built to exactly the standard the concept required.

We felt Cremma expressed our approach clearly enough to stand next to international work, and the A' Design Award offered both an outside benchmark and a wider audience for the studio.

Carrying one concept intact through architecture, custom production and execution sharpened our full-scope process and the international recognition reinforced that our way of working, design and making under one roof, is worth protecting.

A natural closing note: Cremma is a compact demonstration of the whole studio; one reworked-classical idea, designed, made and built under one roof.

Departman was founded by two of us; Gülşah Kasap Çelik and Rıdvan Çelik, though the team has grown since. Both of us spent our early years in the countryside, close to nature, and moved to Istanbul for high school and university. I studied Interior Architecture and Environmental Design at Bahçeşehir University, then spent three years in Germany for a master's in UNESCO World Heritage Studies at Brandenburg University of Technology. Rıdvan trained in painting at Sinop Fine Arts High School and in Interior Architecture at Marmara University, and worked in several studios before we began producing together in a workshop and founded Departman in 2016.

What pulled us in was the wish to be responsible for the whole rather than a fragment of it. In the offices we worked in, you draw parts of someone else's building and stay invisible; we wanted work we could put ourselves into and follow through in every detail. Beyond that, we simply like the state of thinking, imagining spaces, walls and objects that don't exist yet. Design is the discipline that lets that daydreaming become something real and lived-in.

We chose it, but it never felt like a decision made against some other life. Coming from an art background, making and looking closely were already how we related to the world. It felt less like picking a career and more like naming something that was already there.

We deliberately avoid specializing. We've designed offices, cafés, patisseries, a gym, a laboratory, shops, bars, homes, street furniture, and sometimes just a single wall or a piece of furniture. If anything, we'd like more work led by its handcraft, spaces built around reliefs, sculptural walls and pieces we produce ourselves where the art isn't decoration laid on top of the design but the reason the space exists.

I'd gently set aside the word "legend." The useful things we can pass on are simpler: look a great deal at ancient cities and at what's being made right now and let the two feed each other. Learn to think in three dimensions, and protect the time to think at all. And resist the pressure to specialize too early; the discomfort of an unfamiliar project is usually where you actually grow.

A good designer solves the brief; ergonomics, circulation, function, budget and solves it well. A great designer does all of that and then asks a question the brief didn't, leaving a layer of thought in the space that keeps working on you after you've stopped noticing the plan. Competence resolves a problem; the difference is whether the space also makes you think.

For us, a design becomes really good when it can last visually and physically without leaning on the moment it was made in. We look at whether the materials are honest, whether the space has an identity rather than a collection of trends, and whether it was designed for a person actually living in it rather than for the final photograph. If it still feels considered ten years later, it was good

Good design is quietly economical. A space that is well made and long-lasting doesn't need redoing every few years which is cheaper over time and a more responsible use of materials and labour. And there's a daily return that's harder to measure: a space that works with you instead of against you improves ordinary life every single day.

With more time, we'd love to design something public or cultural: a space that is part of a shared civic life. Given my background in heritage studies, working on a place with its own history is the direction we're most drawn to.

The one we keep imagining is the adaptive reuse of a historic structure; taking a building with real memory and letting it carry a contemporary life without erasing what it was. It sits exactly where our two interests meet: heritage on one side, and our habit of playing with tradition rather than copying it on the other.

There's no secret, but if there's an ingredient, it's the time we protect for thinking; before anything is drawn, we spend a lot of it imagining. Our other constant is handcraft, the reliefs and sculptural surfaces. We describe the process like sculpting: we pick up a stone and strip away everything unnecessary until something unexpected is left.

Honestly, our strongest influences are less a list of famous names and more the anonymous builders of the ancient cities we walk through, people whose names we'll never know but whose thinking is still standing.

The work we return to tends to share one quality: it looks inevitable, as if it couldn't have been otherwise, and it holds up regardless of when it was made

If we have to choose, Cremma in Koşuyolu is the one we're proudest of; it recently received a Silver A' Design Award. What makes it feel complete to us is that nothing in it is decoration for its own sake: the handcraft, the materials and the spatial logic all belong to a single idea, so it reads as a place with an identity rather than an assembly of nice objects.

Keep looking, and look widely; ancient sites and contemporary work in the same week. Make things with your hands, because building a relief or a piece of furniture teaches you what a drawing can't. For us, art training was the thing that let us think spatially, and travelling through old cities is still our best teacher.

Probably something in heritage and culture; perhaps archaeology or simply making things with our hands: sculpture, objects. A different surface, but the same instinct: understanding how things were made, and making new ones.

For us, design is the opposite of decoration. Decoration places objects; design solves a life — how someone actually moves, works, rests and hosts in a space and, at its best, gives them something to think about while they do. We're not trying to fill a room; we're trying to make it live.

The honest answer is each other. Departman began at the same time as our relationship, and Rıdvan is both my partner and the person the whole practice is built with. Nothing we've done would exist as a solo effort.

A few things: working as a genuine pair at the core, so every idea is tested in dialogue; our art education, which taught us to think in three dimensions; and building an in-house workshop and team, which lets us make what we design instead of compromising it. Refusing to specialize kept us learning, too.

Before Departman there was an earlier partnership I worked hard in but never reached what we wanted and, on Rıdvan's side, years of drawing fragments of other people's buildings while staying invisible. Since then the obstacles are mostly practical: running a studio in Istanbul, tight budgets, and buildings that fight back, an unexpected beam, a wall that can't move. Often those constraints end up improving the design

Show the thinking, not only the final photograph. A project makes more sense when you can see the problem it solved and the relationships around it, city, street, home, furniture rather than a single styled image. Honesty in presentation is part of honesty in design.

Right now we're developing ON HAUS; a café built around a prismatic, glass-block form, almost a small temple with a coloured glass frieze. What to expect from us is less a fixed signature look than a continued way of thinking

We're wary of treating a career as a summit to reach. Our real aim is to keep progressing with pleasure rather than drowning in a fixed target, and to catch the spirit of the time in what we make. If the spaces we leave behind still feel considered years from now, that's enough.

I'd resist the "esteemed" a little. What people reasonably expect is consistency, a recognisable way of thinking together with the willingness not to repeat yourself. Holding those two at once, identity and newness, is the actual job.

Mostly through longevity and honesty. Quality, well-crafted spaces last, which reduces waste and uses natural resources more carefully. And spaces designed for real life ; ones that ask a little something of the people in them, raise the baseline of ordinary environments, which is a quiet social good.

We're excited that Cremma Koşuyolu's Silver A' Design Award was presented on stage at the gala in Como this summer. On the drawing board, ON HAUS is the one energising us most right now — its glass-block temple form is unlike anything we've built.

The Fenerbahçe house overlooking Kalamış Marina is a favourite. We took the reds of the sunset, the light breaking through the sailboat masts and the texture of the rocks, and translated them into wave-form masses spread through the whole home. Cremma gives us a similar satisfaction, both are projects where a single idea carries the entire space.

We'd like to see less throwaway, trend-chasing decoration and more thinking and, alongside it, more respect for craft and the labour behind it. Spaces made only to be photographed and then replaced are a waste of both materials and skill.

Towards sustainability, sensory and biophilic thinking, recycling and reuse, treated not as separate features but as one awareness. Technology will be part of it, but the real shift is designing with a more conscious relationship to both the natural and the built environment.

It genuinely depends on scale and scope. A compact café might run roughly eight to twelve weeks; larger or more involved projects take considerably longer, especially since we keep design, execution and in-house furniture under one roof, handled by our own team. We'd rather a project take the time it needs than force a deadline into the design.

With two things: the space itself ; ceiling height, natural light, how the independent volumes relate to one another and the person who'll use it. Before any furniture list or target image, we try to see the space through the life that will happen in it.

Design, don't decorate and catch the spirit of the time rather than the trend of the moment.

We try to stand outside that loop. Chasing trends dates a space quickly; we'd rather aim for something timeless and let the design set its own terms. Trends come and go around the work rather than driving it.

It's a tool, never the author. We use it heavily, rendering and post-production, and once a street-furniture project that recycled PET bottles into filament for 3D printing but it serves the idea. The moment technology starts leading the design instead of enabling it, something has gone wrong.

Our work runs on 3ds Max for modelling, V-Ray and Corona for rendering, and increasingly AI render tools alongside them, with a fair amount of post-production in Photoshop. Just as importantly, there's a real workshop, where the reliefs and furniture actually get made; the hand tools matter as much as the software.

Central. They're where we start, not where we finish. We favour natural materials with energy, wood and stone, and surfaces worked enough to feel lived-in. We spread the chosen colours and materials across the whole space in careful proportion so no part feels detached, and we treat light as a material too.

We wish more people asked about the thinking behind a space, why it is the way it is rather than only what it cost or how it photographs. The reasoning is the part we're proudest of, and usually the part that stays invisible.

Curiosity, mostly how was this thought through? We want to understand the decision behind it, not just admire the surface. Every genuinely good thing we see leaves us a little richer and a little more restless.

Rıdvan, without question and yes, we believe in co-design completely. Departman is a dialogue by nature; almost nothing we make is one person's idea left unchallenged. The friction between two views is usually where the good decisions come from.

Each other, first. Then our teachers, and less tangibly but truly the anonymous builders of the ancient cities we keep returning to. They set a standard of thinking that still holds.

Our reading leans towards heritage, architectural history and theory more than style.

Art education gave us the foundation; thinking in three dimensions. After that it was hands-on making in the workshop, constant looking, and travelling through old cities, on repeat, for years. Refusing to specialize kept every project a little uncomfortable, and therefore instructive.

Quentin Tarantino. Not an architect at all, but we'd love to sit with someone who builds whole worlds out of borrowed, familiar pieces and makes them feel entirely his own. That's not so far from what we try to do with tradition, and we'd just want to hear how he thinks.

The recognition is meaningful, the Silver A' Design Award for Cremma genuinely moved us but it isn't what drives the work, and "famous" isn't a word we'd use about ourselves. An award is a nice confirmation that the thinking landed; then you go back to the next project, which doesn't care what you won.

Colour, sinopia red. Place, Aphrodisias in Aydın — one of those ancient sites we could lose hours in. Food, calamari. Season, spring. As for a favourite thing, something small and almost absurd: a single cooked grain of rice, fallen alone on the table — which probably tells you the last one already. If a name can be a brand, ours is Salvador Dalí: the precision, the strangeness, the way the ordinary is made to feel dreamed.

The thinking itself, honestly , a morning spent imagining a space is a good day before anything is built. And the moment a relief or a wall we designed comes off the workshop floor looking like the thing we pictured. That's the payment.

Not in any career sense. But we both grew up in the countryside, making things and looking closely at them, and Rıdvan was already in fine-arts school as a teenager. The instinct was there long before the word "designer" was.

We're in no position to predict a thousand years but our bias, from working with heritage, is that what survives is rarely the fashionable thing. It's the well-thought, well-made thing. Whatever the technology, we suspect that stays true.

Only this: try to see the thinking behind the spaces you like, not just their surface, because that's where the real work lives. We're grateful anyone pays attention at all, and we'd rather be understood as people who think about spaces than as people who decorate them. Thank you for reading this far.

Departman is Gülşah Kasap Çelik and Rıdvan Çelik. We both spent the early years of our lives in the countryside, surrounded by nature, and moved to Istanbul for high school and university. Gülşah studied Interior Architecture and Environmental Design at Bahçeşehir University, then spent three years in Germany for a master's in UNESCO World Heritage Studies at Brandenburg University of Technology. Rıdvan trained in painting at Sinop Fine Arts High School and in Interior Architecture at Marmara University's Faculty of Fine Arts, then worked for five years as a designer in various interior architecture offices. What pushed us toward our own practice was the wish to do design rather than decoration, to stop drawing only fragments of someone else's whole and being invisible in the process, and instead make work we could put ourselves into and see through in every detail.

Designing has always felt completely natural to us. Both of us have been designing and making things for as long as we can remember, ever since we were small children shaping things out of earth as we played.

Departman began in 2016, in a workshop, when we started making things together — the studio's story runs in parallel with our own. Today we're an interior architecture and design studio based in Kadıköy, Istanbul, working end to end: concept, design, technical drawings, in-house furniture production and site execution. We deliberately keep our range wide; we've designed offices, cafés, patisseries, a gym, a laboratory, shops, bars and homes, as well as street furniture, project-specific furniture, and sometimes just a single wall. What ties it together is that we produce our own pieces through our atelier line, "dept," so a space is built from things designed for it rather than picked from a catalogue.

For us the line that matters is between design and decoration, we want to do the former. We're constantly imagining, and we treat a space as something to think with: since we started engaging with art we've questioned everything, and we want the artistic elements in our projects to make people stop and think too. Decoration arranges what already exists; design asks a question and answers it in a way people can feel but rarely name.

We deliberately avoid specialising in a single field. We'd rather explore across different areas, step outside familiar patterns and push our own limits. What draws us in most is the start of every project, the research, the learning, narrowing down the possibilities, and bringing together the ideas we feel furthest from with the ones we feel closest to until a decision takes shape. That early stage is the part we find most exciting.

Cremma Koşuyolu. It's a café project that won a Silver A' Design Award, and it captures what I want the studio to be known for: a clear architectural concept carried all the way through to the custom furniture and the light. Seeing it recognised internationally, it's being awarded on stage at the A' Design Award Gala in Como this July meant a lot for a studio of our size.

In a real sense, Departman itself grew out of the first things we made, before there was an office, we were producing pieces together in the workshop, and that hands-on start is what became the studio.

More than any single material, we value restraint, using few, well-chosen, honest materials rather than a crowd of them, so a space keeps its identity and ages well. We work a lot with tactile, straightforward materials: stone, concrete, wood, glass. And the technology we value most is our own atelier; being able to actually make what we design, and to work a form the way a sculptor works stone, taking away until what's left is right, instead of compromising to whatever is available.

Early, at the concept stage, when a space is still just a brief and a set of constraints and anything is possible. A lot of it happens away from any specific project too, we're always daydreaming about spaces, walls and furniture, and holding on to those ideas until the right moment to use them arrives.

We look at a space through the user's eyes rather than through a furniture list or the final photograph, the real test is whether people live in it well. So we focus on function and identity together: how the room is actually used, and what makes it unmistakably itself, achieved with a restrained, well-crafted palette rather than a pile of products. How people move and how the light falls follow from that.

A mix of tension and excitement; the good kind of pressure. There's a real satisfaction in the moment a messy problem suddenly resolves into one clear idea.

That's the best part, and it's different from designing. Because we also build and produce, I get to stand in the finished space and the first time I see a stranger use it exactly the way we imagined, that's the payoff.

For commercial work, success has three layers. It has to serve the guest, feel good to be in. It has to serve the brand, be instantly, memorably that place. And it has to serve the operator, work commercially and hold up to daily use. A beautiful space that's miserable to run isn't a success. When all three line up, the design almost disappears and just feels right.

Whether there's one clear idea, and whether every decision serves it, bad design is usually a pile of nice things with no argument between them. After that we look at the fundamentals classical and modern work share: human scale, proportion, symmetry, geometry and balance. And we look at how it's detailed and how it will wear, because good design survives contact with real use.

To build things that last, and to be honest about what we make. In hospitality there's huge pressure to chase trends and rip out interiors every few years, that's wasteful. Designing for longevity, choosing durable materials, and producing locally (as we do, in our own atelier) are quiet but real responsibilities. A space that people still love in ten years is the most sustainable thing you can make.

Two things at once. Tools are accelerating, AI is already changing how fast we visualise and iterate but that raises the value of the things machines can't do: judgement, a point of view, the ability to build. I think the studios that thrive will be the ones that both design and make, and that keep a strong human identity while using new tools to move faster.

The nearest thing for us is the A' Design Award Gala in Como, Italy, July 2026, where Cremma is being recognised.

We love wandering ancient cities and spending long hours in them. However much they've been altered over the centuries, it's impossible not to appreciate the beauty and richness that still stands there or once did. On the other side, to keep pace with the present we spend hours on design websites; we believe that the more we see, and the more varied it is, the richer we become.

We work in what we'd call a "new classicism" a contemporary architecture that continues the practice of the classical period rather than copying it. We don't reject tradition, we play with it: we take elements people already recognise and recombine them in an unfamiliar way, so the result feels born from within tradition rather than applied on top of it. The language grew out of our own experience, the things we've seen, our memories, the way we perceive, used without slipping into repetition, so existing knowledge becomes something of our own. We're not confined to the neoclassical, either; we'll reference Gothic, Renaissance or Baroque just as freely. For us classicism isn't a style to be reproduced but a language that enriches a space artistically and adapts to any scenario a contemporary project demands.

In practice that means marrying the expressive elements of classical architecture ;columns, arches with the structural language of modern building, and new materials and techniques with classical aesthetics and methods. The traits that recur are simple geometry, poetic and sculptural forms, and handcrafted wall reliefs, all held together by the principles classical and modern design share: human scale, symmetry, proportion, geometry and balance. Our approach is closer to sculpting than decorating. We pick up the stone and strip away everything unnecessary until something new emerges from an entirely different angle. The image we like is a marble elephant with a single leg made of glass: utterly familiar, and then one deliberate move that changes how you read the whole thing. The balance shifts with each client, but that instinct; tradition, reworked, runs through all of it.

We live and work in Istanbul. The city is unavoidably part of the work. It has always sat between East and West, old and new, and that tension is a gift for a designer; one of us even spent years studying World Heritage, and that pull toward the layered and the historic runs through what we do. The upside is a deep well of texture, craft and contrast to draw on. The downside is a tough, fast-moving market with real budget pressure — though that constraint keeps the work disciplined.

End to end. We start with the client's brief and their operational reality, develop a concept, take it through design and technical documentation, produce the custom furniture in our own atelier, and manage execution on site. The client has one team accountable from first sketch to opening day, which is rarer than it should be.

Look past the pretty renders and ask two things: has the designer actually built what they draw, and do they understand your business, not just your aesthetic? A good hospitality designer will ask about your margins and your staff workflow before they ask about your mood board. And check how their older projects have aged, that tells you more than a fresh photoshoot.

It usually runs in stages. First, understanding; the brief, the site, the budget, how the business actually operates. Then the concept; finding the one idea the whole space will hang on. Then design and visualisation, where we develop it in 3D and test it. Then production. Designing and building the custom furniture. And finally execution on site, where we protect the idea through all the real-world compromises. The through-line is that single concept; every stage is just defending it.

It usually splits between the studio in Kadıköy; concept work, drawings, reviewing renders and time on site or in the atelier, where design meets reality. As two partners running the whole process with our team there's rarely a clean line between work and life.

Learn how things are actually made. The biggest gap in young designers is between a beautiful drawing and a buildable one, close it early. Say yes to small projects and see them all the way to the finished space; you learn more from one built café than ten unbuilt competition boards. And develop a point of view, the market rewards a clear identity more than technical polish.

The positive is obvious and never gets old: you make things that exist in the world, that people use every day. The negative is that it's demanding and rarely switches off, tight budgets, tight timelines, and the emotional weight of caring about details clients sometimes can't see. But the trade is worth it.

Every decision has to serve the one central idea. If it doesn't, it goes, no matter how much you like it.

Beyond drawing: understanding construction and materials, understanding the client's business, and the discipline to edit. A background in art helps too, it's what lets you think a space through in three dimensions before it exists. And increasingly, communication: a great idea you can't convey to a client never gets built.

For visualisation, 3ds Max with V-Ray,Corona and the full Adobe Creative Cloud — mainly Photoshop and Camera Raw for grading our renders. We've also built an AI-assisted post-processing workflow to polish render lighting without ever altering the design itself. Beyond software, the real toolbox is our furniture atelier and the workshop, the ability to make, not just draw. And Istanbul, as a constant reference library.

By protecting the concept stage and being disciplined afterward. The upfront thinking is slow on purpose; if the central idea is right, the later stages go faster because every decision has a reference point. And because we control design, production and build in-house, we lose less time in the hand-offs that usually kill schedules.

It depends on scale. A single furniture piece can go from idea to finished prototype in 6 weeks. A full café interior is typically an 8–12 week build once design is set, for context, a roughly 80m² space runs in that range. The design phase before it varies with how clear the client's brief is.

"How much will it cost, and how long will it take?" usually before "what will it look like." Which is fair: for a hospitality client, the interior is an investment, not decoration.

Cremma. Taking a café project through concept, custom production and build, and then having it recognised with an international A' Design Award, that was the moment the studio's full-scope approach proved itself

Our portfolio skews heavily toward specialty coffee, F&B and retail.

It's less about a category and more about the challenge. We're drawn to projects with real constraints, a tight footprint, a tight budget, a strong operational brief because those leave no room for decorative filler: every material and every custom piece has to earn its place. A lot of that work happens to be in coffee and F&B, but what we enjoy is the problem, not the sector, the tighter and less obvious it is, the more interesting it gets.

We have plans, but what really drives us is to keep moving with pleasure rather than drowning in the pursuit of a single goal. Our specific targets shift constantly through a project; the deeper aim that doesn't change is to catch the spirit of the time. Concretely, that includes growing our in-house furniture line, dept, as a design identity in its own right.

As a team, working together, supported by our atelier where the pieces are actually built. We share and shape the design direction between us; the finished work depends on that whole chain from idea to production.

Yes, ON HAUS, a café concept built around a striking prismatic, glass-block "temple" form with a pediment and a coloured glass frieze against exposed concrete and wood.

Through our website, departman.co, and on Instagram at @departman.co — or @dept.atolye for the furniture line.

info@departman.co

Departman designs, produces and builds under one roof, and that this is deliberate — it's the whole philosophy in one sentence.