Crafted with Care

Abstract

Crafted with Care imagines a small-batch bean-to-bar artisanal chocolaterie producing luxury craft chocolate, sited within a space of 1000 square meters on a sloped terrain in the medieval town of Gruyères in Switzerland, located at the top of an 82 meter-high hill overlooking the Saane valley. The rural town of Gruyères specializing in milk production and cattle breeding remains a popular tourist destination for the traditional precision craftsmanship of the infamous cheese and chocolate production. The existing family-owned chocolaterie, Chocolaterie de Gruyères, producing artisanal craft chocolate is integrated with the existing fortification at the entrance of Gruyères with proximity to regional products—such as double cream, Friborg milk, Morello cherries, Swiss kirsch, and Swiss cane beets—for their dark or milk "bean to bar" chocolate products. However, the new engagement of the chocolaterie with Hermès, a family-owned French house recognized for its luxury crafted goods, to preserve the craft of chocolate-making from its forthcoming extinction requires a new development of Chocolaterie de Gruyères to express the luxury and craft of chocolate-making and is thus sited in an exclusive heritage monument of the fort tower, offering a parallel exclusivity that compliments the product identity. The chocolaterie—committed to the tenets of traceability—is redesigned to additionally function as a gallery, educating the visitors on the transparency of chocolate processing and the value of craft production through the implicit connection with the maker. Through the disintegration of chocolate production into its layers of programmatic elements, the chocolaterie tends to highlight the precision at each level of chocolate-making, while providing different transitional routes for the varying consumer flux. The integration of the new intervention with the existing fortifications creates visual and transitional vistas overlooking the chocolate production, thus connecting the preservation of the building with the preservation of the craft of the inherently luxurious chocolates.
The site in the car-free village has proximity to parking areas, is located at a distance of 800 meters from the railway station, and at a distance of 90 meters from the bus stop with excellent connectivity for the transport of these chocolates into the major Swiss trade routes in Europe. A resultant modified supply chain will allow Swiss local experts to introduce a new distribution network of real chocolate across the Blue Banana, under a premium brand, eventually customizing the consumer experience in Albert in Delft through a branded shop-in-a-shop to reach a target demography with its artisanal opulence.