Hiroyuki Miyake’s new ice-cream parlour looks more like a funeral parlour. The shop, designed for ice-cream-makers Ronó in Nagoya, Japan, has a stark, colourless interior that is the antithesis of a traditional Italian gelateria.

The shop is arranged around a sharp-edged, clinical white counter. The walls are uniformly tiled, with the exception of one seamless mirrored wall. “I used muted colours to enhance the colour of the ice-cream,” says Miyake. “The space brightens the ice-cream like a jewel.”

The mirrored wall creates two illusions, doubling the size of a small space and making a simple black picture frame and its contents appear to float in mid-air. On the shop’s glass façade, Miyake has repeated some simple patterns taken from Italian panelling and vaults, a minimal tribute to the gelateria’s European origins.