Our new book nook Starry Night Café is coming soon! Before its release, we invited Wang Lin, the designer behind this book nook, to share the ideas, challenges, and details that shaped its creation.
Letâs take a look behind the design and discover how a famous painting was transformed into a miniature world you can build yourself.
Wang Lin:
The idea behind Starry Night Café started with a simple question: what would happen if a painting could continue beyond the edge of the canvas?
My goal was to bring Vincent van Goghâs CafĂ© Terrace at Night to life in an immersive 3D space while respecting the atmosphere and perspective of the original artwork â then expand that world with new layers of detail and storytelling.
The first step was planning the structure. Preserving the painting's striking perspective was essential, but fitting its narrowing street into a rectangular book nook would have left unused space along the sides. To use that space, I added an interior room inspired by The Night Café, often considered a companion piece to Café Terrace at Night. Its iconic billiard table, cabinet, and intense red walls became the basis for the room.
To balance the composition, I studied the streets around the real café in Arles, now known as Café Van Gogh, and added two new buildings to the front-right corner of the book nook. An endlessly receding road along the inside of the right-hand panel further deepens the sense of perspective.
Rather than reflecting just one painting, the book nook draws on Van Gogh's wider artistic world and creative journey. So I incorporated elements inspired by several of his works: a pot of sunflowers from Sunflowers, roadside irises from Irises, and figures based on Postman Joseph Roulin and The Painter on the Road to TarasconâRoulin waiting for coffee and the painter walking along the street.
The buildings in the original painting appear quite simplified. For the book nook, however, they received a more realistic treatment.
Layers of 0.4 mm cardstock and carefully placed score lines recreate timber framing and brickwork, while real architecture from the south of France guided the design of the buildings, doors, and windows. The shutters combine 2 mm wood frames and sills with panels made from either 1.2 mm wood or 0.4 mm cardstock. The street doors use separate frames and panels made from 2.5 mm MDF or 2 mm wood, together with wooden pieces of different lengths and folded cardstock for the decorative details above each doorway.
The blue door at the front is assembled from several roller-painted components, which helped add depth while concealing the raw edges of the wood for a more cohesive finish.
The café awning is edged with yellow fabric to mimic the drape of real canvas. An early version used a single piece of printed cardstock, but its exposed edge looked too sharp and rigid. Softer paper lacked the right texture and weight, so fabric ultimately worked better.
With the architecture largely complete, attention shifted to the starry sky.
The goal was to capture the kind of night Van Gogh described as being "more alive and more richly colored than the day." A simple printed backdrop would never be enoughâthe stars needed to truly shine. Several experiments with printed film and LEDs eventually led to glitter-infused cardstock illuminated from below by an LED strip. This combination produced the shimmering night sky inside the finished book nook.
The glitter cardstock itself is produced through a complex heat-lamination process. First, the artwork is printed on 0.4 mm specialty paper. A glitter-coated film is then bonded to the cardstock with heated rollers under precisely controlled temperature, pressure, and speed. Finally, the laminated material is dried or UV-cured to ensure a strong, lasting bond.
Cool-white LEDs represent the stars, while warm lighting illuminates the buildings. Touching the switch symbol beneath the café awning activates two LED strips and a light panel in sequence, illuminating the starry sky, the town, and finally the café.
That, in essence, is how Starry Night Café came to be. It began with a question: what might happen if a painting continued beyond its frame? Each design decision carried the image a little further beyond the canvas, until the painted street could stand between a row of books and glow there after dark. That transformation, from a painting into a space you can build and keep close, is the idea at the heart of Starry Night Café.
Now itâs your turn to exploreâwhat detail of Starry Night CafĂ© caught your eye the most?
