Dassai Blue Sake Brewery

Dassai Blue Sake Brewery creatively adapts a former banal chain grocery store building and site into an advanced manufacturing hub, incorporating elements of traditional Japanese architectural and garden design. Projecting that the American sake market is poised to grow, the project invites the public in by incorporating a tasting room and brewery tours, gardens, and a stage for intimate outdoor performances.

The site sits alongside the Route 5 scenic corridor, fronted by a historic stone wall and mature groves of trees that screen it from the road and give it immediate character. A concrete sidewalk pulls away from the road and drifts through the trees, drawing passers-by into the campus.

The existing building shell, parking lot, retention basin, stormwater network, and loading docks were all retained and adapted rather than replaced. A restrained palette and careful planning made the transformation both economical and high-impact.

Further in, the parking lot was split into quadrants and selectively removed to make room for planting, landscape program, and a new rice polishing building. An orchard of cherry trees surrounds the stage; long bands of birch and aspen divide the site into landscape rooms, drawing on Hudson Valley character to reduce the scale of the open spaces left by the former lot.

Along the former grocery store facade, a cedar-clad engawa, a Japanese-style porch, bridges the tasting room and visitor entry with a densely planted garden of gravel terraces, yew hedges, and sumac groundcover.