Pre Game is an immersive concept store, restaurant, and bar in Heart of Bangalore, envisioned as a sculpted, maze-inspired interior that transforms a structurally challenging shell into a continuous, cavern-like spatial narrative. Drawing from Egyptian cave formations, subterranean passages, and ancient excavation logics, the project reinterprets primordial spatiality through contemporary material innovation and an experiential architectural language. The experience unfolds through the concept store, which acts as the first threshold of the “cave.” Curated products are displayed within carved niches, recessed bands, and sculpted voids.

This Immersive Concept Store Is Sculpted As A Maze In Bangalore | ATELIER ASTIL

The Circulation

Here, the maze-like circulation becomes intentional: it guides visitors deeper into the store, encouraging exploration and engagement, ensuring they complete their selection before being naturally led upward toward the restaurant level. This journey—first through the sculpted retail landscape, then upward through the carved passages—forms the backbone of the project’s experiential narrative.

Material Identity

Although the two floors offer distinct atmospheres, they remain unified by a single material identity and an unbroken spatial flow. The site imposed significant constraints: numerous structural columns, exposed beams, and unusually low ceiling heights. Rather than concealing these limitations, the design absorbs and transforms them. Columns swell into monolithic masses; beams dissolve into contoured ceiling profiles; structure reshapes itself into architecture.

Limitations Turn Into Features

This approach converts limitations into defining features, creating a muscular, unified interior where no element feels additive. A continuous high-build textured skin forms the core of the construction system, built through a calibrated layering process that combines base plaster, high-build textured paint, micro-cement coats, and hand-troweled finishing layers. This multi-layer composition creates controlled density, variation, and compression across the surface, producing the effect of a single carved mass rather than assembled components.

The Curvature

The deeper recesses, overhangs, and consistent curvature are supported by a concealed aluminum sub-frame system, which provides dimensional stability while allowing precise shaping of negative volumes and organic profiles. Once the geometry is established, the textured layers are applied in successive passes—with varying grain sizes and binder ratios—to achieve a stone-like monolithic appearance that integrates seamlessly over walls, ceilings, beams, and columns. The result is a technically coordinated envelope where structure, sub-structure, and finish operate as one continuous architectural system.

Light As An Emotion

The designers engineered light as the emotional core of the project. A crafted overhead aperture simulates the presence of a skylight, giving the impression of natural top-light in a site without any daylight access. This soft illumination introduces vertical relief, washing across the textured surfaces like light entering an ancient cavern. At night, layered coves, recessed channels, and indirect lighting create a dynamic interplay of glow and shadow, amplifying the sense of depth and excavation. Shadows move across ridges, accentuating the handcrafted textures and reinforcing the cave narrative.

Fact File

Designed by: ATELIER ASTIL

Project Type: Restaurants & Bars, Store Architecture Design

Project Name: Pregame Concept Store and Bar

Location: Bengaluru

Year Built: 2025

Built-up Area: 9999 sqft

Principal Architects: Arpita Sharma  

Photograph Courtesy: Arjun Krishna

Manufacturers:  Asian Paints, MERINO LAMINATES, Nitco, SHANKESHWAR METALS

DESIGNING GFC DRAWINGS: SANJAY PARANTHAMAN, KARTHIKEYA BAGEWADI

Source: Archdaily

Firm’s Website Link: ATELIER ASTIL

Firm’s Instagram Link: ATELIER ASTIL

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