Location
Coorg, India
Industry
Commercial
Scope of Work
Architectural Design / Construction
Timeline
3 months
Year
2025
Wildlife Truffles is a café in Coorg designed to hold its own against the landscape — and invite it in.
Function & Form built the space around reclaimed timber and a Coorg vernacular roofline — materials that feel native to the region and honest about their age. Porthole windows frame the outside world like small paintings. Tables are built from salvaged wood, their grain and imperfections left unhidden. The wild isn't a theme here — it's a material.
The result is a place on the main road that earns you stopping.
Materials
Reclaimed and salvaged timber runs through almost every surface — wall cladding, communal tables, window frames, and doors. Antique doors and old windows were sourced, carefully restored, and reintroduced into the structure. Terracotta Mangalore roof tiles sit on an exposed rafter ceiling, left visible from inside. Black steel frames the openings. Engineered bamboo was used structurally where it counted. At the centre of the space, a full tree trunk was placed as a load-bearing column — unworked, exactly as found.
Every object was looked for, not ordered.
Approach
Nothing in Wildlife Truffles was specified from a catalogue. The driftwood piece shaped like a dragon became the door handle. The antique shutters found their way back into use. The design process was as much foraging as it was drawing — finding materials with a past and building a brief around what they could do. The result is a space that feels assembled over decades, not delivered on a schedule.
