Made with Love

A vegetarian drive-thru is revolutionizing how we think about our fast food dining experience through design in this deliberately familiar, environmentally sustainable space that invites the community to come in and enjoy nutritious meals made fresh and fast on site—in a humble place, filled with light, where authentic materials meet authentic food, where people tend to linger. If they have the time, it’s worth spending it here.

Fast Food Farm Stand

INTERSTICE Architects was asked to synthesize site and building to translate the Amy’s Kitchen natural foods brand into the Amy’s Drive-Thru location in Corte Madera, California. The architecture of the restaurant is a hybrid between a farm kitchen and an agrarian barn, using weathered woods and plenty of natural light. It’s a happy place to be, where you can feel good about the choices you make for yourself and for the planet. The all-vegetarian meals, wrapped in compostable packaging, are served in the lofty, open dining area or outside on the spacious patio garden.

Amy’s Revolution

Amy’s Kitchen is a distinctly Northern California phenomenon. Created in 1988 in Petaluma, the company started as a natural and vegetarian foods maker, building their brand on crafting healthy, ready-made meals like canned soups and frozen entrees for hungry customers on the go. Wanting to expand the brand, Amy’s turned an eye towards transforming the fast food industry. INTERSTICE Architects partnered with the company to create this community-oriented destination for busy households and passerby where one doesn’t have to compromise budget or time to enjoy healthy comfort food.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Highway Island Site

The Drive-Thru, situated along the Highway 101 corridor, is a long and thin lozenge-shaped property squeezed between Paradise Drive and the Mt. Tamalpais exit ramp, about a dozen miles north of San Francisco. INTERSTICE sited the new building tight to the freeway using its mass and volume to protect the garden and entry plaza from noise and prevailing winds, while keeping the drive-thru queue hidden along the property line fence behind lush plantings. Native plantings and vegetated bioswales act as visual and auditory buffers from Paradise Drive and the neighboring highway, creating a casual and picnic-like experience for diners, all while passively treating storm water across the site.

Exceptional Use

Amy’s Kitchen, an exceptional fast food provider, made the case that not all fast food is created equal. With INTERSTICE participating in leading the entitlements effort, the local community overwhelmingly supported the opening of Amy’s Drive-Thru. The Corte Madera Town Council made a notable exception to their municipal code to allow this unique drive-thru largely based on Amy’s minimal carbon and energy footprint—not only in their compostable packaging, but in the overall design of the site and building. The project faced an additional challenge of building in a flood zone. Working with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), INTERSTICE proposed an approach to keep the building safer from floods with an integrated floodgate system which is essentially invisible but may be deployed within 24 hours in a sizeable flood event.

Green ROOFsign

A key tenet for Amy’s Kitchen is environmental sustainability. The Corte Madera location features a lush green roof that can be easily seen from the highway, acting as an ecological beacon for commuters to and from the city. The drive-thru’s gabled green roof is perhaps the most visible way Amy’s is changing how fast food restaurants address environmental impact of food distribution, not only through meat alternatives, farming, and the food manufacturing industry, but also through stormwater run-off control and promotion of biodiversity. The 4,200-square-foot building is designed with an eight-inch-deep vegetated roof with over a dozen drought tolerant plant species that provide habitat, storm water benefit, and heat reduction for the building.

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