"There is a coffee shop in Hastings called ‘Cake Room,’ it is filled to the brim with

exotic plants, faux palms, screen prints of palms and they also sell cake. I sit there

and have my Flat White and look at the pristine, bathroom-esq tiled walls and the

assorted tropical plants from Homebase. There is a sense of calm and

professionality about this ambience, and it is purely to create an ambience. The

mixture of the blank, tabula rasa, hospital room with the intended ecology creates a

sense of manufactured calm.

The use of tropicality in commercial space has had a resurgence of late, the amount

of palm trees and cheese plants in an establishment creates a scale of how much

the interior leans into the creation of this fantasy. The use of a ‘romanticism and

primitivism’ through ecology challenges the definition of postmodern space,

bringing us away from consumer tropes and more into the world of the air

conditioned Eden (Morton, 2020.)" - GG Skips

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