Sunday's Best

Willis Kusuma’s multi-functional Mister Sunday elevates the Jakarta café scene with the timelessness and formal honesty of concrete

- MH Canlas

For Jakarta-based architect Willis Kusuma, no material captures timelessness better than concrete. “I remember looking at the works of the great masters, Le Corbusier and Louis Kahn, who used concrete frequently and always marveled at how they arrived at structures that transcend time. They were constructed in the past but could well belong to the present too! I wanted that same quality for my building.”

A chaotic site

Before the runaway success that is Mister Sunday Café, there was a 250-square-meter lot on a crowded residential street in the throes of commercial reinvention. The local government had just rezoned Jalan Cikajang (Cikajang Street) to allow retail establishments, and in the mad rush to open establishments, shops and restaurants sprouted up higgledy-piggledy. The scarcity of parking space was a major issue on the narrow street.

Kusuma’s client, a young couple with pets, wanted a three-story structure for their home, graphic design studio, and their café business. Says Kusuma: “Seeing all these chaotic business establishments along the street convinced me that my addition needed to look rooted and permanent. At the same time, we wanted to stretch our horizons with the usage of concrete. We’d worked with concrete in some of our earlier projects, but never to the extent as Mister Sunday.”

Concrete plan