EGA Juice Clinic

A juice bar fit-out at Raffles Hospital. Fluted timber counters and marble tops wrap the service area, with backlit signage, product display shelving and cabinetry built around the chilled display units.

A juice bar fit-out at Raffles Hospital, Bugis, completed May 2019. A hospital tenancy is the
strictest site we work on — fixed delivery routes, noise windows, and a handover that cannot
move because the unit opens with the hospital.

Building cabinetry around equipment you did not choose

The hardest part of a food and beverage fit-out is rarely the finish. It is the chilled display
units: bought appliances with fixed dimensions, a service clearance and a ventilation requirement,
which the joinery has to wrap so the result still reads as built-in rather than as a fridge pushed
into a gap.

Get the opening wrong by 10 mm and the unit does not go in. Get the ventilation gap wrong
and it goes in, runs hot, and fails in a year. Both are decided on the drawing, before anything is
cut.

A fluted counter and a marble top

The service counter is a fluted timber front with a marble top, lit from above by pendants and
backed by the chilled display. Same vocabulary as the fluted
work in a landed home — different duty. A retail counter is leant on, wheeled into and
cleaned with product spills on it every day, so the edge detail and the top fixing matter more than
the figure of the stone.

Retail shelving is a merchandising decision

The product wall runs lit open shelving over closed base units in a dark finish, with the
lighting set into the shelf above rather than behind the product. Shelf heights are set to the
tallest bottle in the range plus a hand, not to a standard module, because a shelf that is 20 mm
too short makes a whole row unsellable.

Backlit signage and the glazed frontage complete the unit, which in a hospital concourse has to
read clearly from both approaches along the corridor.

Also see: Xing Hua Lou, a
restaurant fit-out at Causeway Point, and our landed
home carpentry work.