Little Giant

A block from the historic Fox Theater in Oakland’s Uptown District, Little Giant Ice Cream is both a scoop shop and an operational facility with each stage of production in full view of customers. Medium Plenty converted a raw commercial space into this multi-purpose community hub, taking inspiration from old-school factories.

A glass and brick “building” at the center of the wide-open volume lets the public watch pasteurization through packaging. The design brief—“fun but not cliché”—yielded kid-sized picnic tables, painted sprinkler pipes, and vintage robots watching over the playful mood inside. Hospitality interiors here double as transparent manufacturing: the making of ice cream becomes part of the guest experience rather than a back-of-house secret.

Interior architecture and interior design by Medium Plenty, with Black Creek Builders as contractor and photography by Melissa Kaseman. Little Giant shows Medium Plenty’s retail-hospitality approach when production is meant to be seen—factory cues without pastiche, community seating at kid scale, and an open plan that keeps Uptown foot traffic connected to the craft of the scoop. The project is sited in Oakland, California. Based on the studio’s published program, the work reads as a hospitality project.