Kolpokar: One of Dhaka’s last creative spaces closing its doors

Gulshan 2 circle is full of glassy, modern commercial buildings. Only a few ignore that particular aesthetic. 

One such building houses a well-known curtain shop on its ground floor, offices above, and, tucked among them, an unassuming restaurant on the sixth floor.

Step out of the lift and you are greeted by soft blue light, the smell of waffles and coffee, and the clamour of children — chattering voices, running feet, laughter.

This is Kolpokar.

Visiting Bangladesh from London with her two children, nine and five, Inshra Russell was looking for somewhere more than another place to take the kids.

"Keeping two children occupied is not always easy. Everyone is busy, so I have to spend quite a lot of time thinking about what I'm going to do with them."

Her cousin suggested Kolpokar. Inshra, a visual storyteller, says creativity is central to how she raises her children.

"I'm a visual storyteller," she says. "Anything creative really attracts me. Helping as many people as possible become creative is a very important part of my life."

"It's not a huge cafe—it's a split-level cafe," she says. "When I walked in, I immediately understood that something fun was going to happen here."

"There was this sense of being overwhelmed—'Oh my God, where do I look? What do I do?' We were all amazed."

"The 3D things, the colours, the walls, the 3D printer, the lights. Everything was happening together. The whole experience was very different from any other cafe."

Inshra met Rashid Uz Zaman, founder of Kolpokar, and Gigi, his wife, who is from the Philippines. With them, she began exploring the activity menu, guided by her cousin, who had visited before.

She was surprised the cafe wasn't aimed mainly at children.

"My cousin's friends are in their late thirties. They have jobs, and they come here after work and sit and do 3D painting just to forget about work," she says. "It's therapeutic. They come here for therapy, in a way, and they talk and spend time together."

Her five-year-old daughter, Dion, made jewellery and a bag tag with Gigi's help, while Inshra stayed at a distance. Her son Ruben and the other children tried VR and later played football.

"They had so much fun playing because football is their favourite thing," she says.

Inshra joined in too, painting a picture and turning it into a creature. "It was so much fun to do because you don't really understand how enjoyable it is until you actually do it."

"I haven't seen anything like this in London," she says. "I haven't specifically searched for something like this, but I haven't come across anything like it."

Most cafes in Dhaka are built around eating, talking and photographs. Kolpokar is different: here, visitors get involved.

Almost every desk has a child busy with colourful filament coils, making something of their own. A 3D pen traces a drawing from a template, or from an idea in the child's mind. Nearby, a freshly printed vase is being painted, and small figures are covered in acrylic and glitter.

There are bag tags and keychains to personalise, and glass slides printed with Bangladeshi flowers, birds and motifs, ready to be painted. A photograph can become a keepsake, framed with a 3D-printed stand and decorated by hand. Resin sessions offer a chance to make jewellery; a blank canvas offers drawing and painting without much of a plan. There's VR too, ranging from action-packed to calm.

The menu takes a playful detour into Filipino flavours.

Rashid Zaman, owner of Kolpokar, explains, "These toy-type products—we make everything a little family-oriented, giving name tags so that a husband and wife can make something for one another. This frame-making is a different kind of memory. You take your picture, you make it yourself, and then it becomes a decoration piece."

Each activity is designed with intent: "The customer comes, they know they're going to have a fun time, but at the end they can take away something meaningful, which elevates the bond. It elevates the memory."

To Rashid, something is missing from how art is usually taught. "Here, art is taken very high, without design elements to it," he says. When a child draws in three dimensions, he explains, "automatically coding, mathematical angle, geometry and problem-solving—these things come in."

"If we can give them this problem-solving skill from childhood, which is basically the basic work of design, then we can make them accustomed to it from childhood."

Staff show children how something can be made rather than handing over a finished model, letting them encounter problems and ask questions. Rashid sees this as pushing back against a habit of constant correction—"Draw a flower." "Draw this." "Why are you drawing that?"—that he says discourages imagination.

Staff pay particular attention to children who seem restless or unwilling to follow the expected path, stepping in to nurture rather than discipline them. Out of a hundred children, Rashid estimates, only two to five genuinely want to cross the boundaries—and those, he believes, are worth the attention.

Kolpokar initially wanted children to design without copying, but recognised how deeply copying is embedded in children's learning, and compromised by introducing templates as a starting point. The point isn't simply to keep children entertained, but to help them understand how to think through making.

The menu takes a playful detour into Filipino flavours: BBQ, sour-cream-and-onion and cheesy fries; maja blanca, a coconut-milk custard given a local touch with gur syrup and peanuts; chicken sausage and cheese waffles; chicken lumpia; and arroz caldo, a chicken, lemongrass and ginger congee. Chai and khejur lattes round out the drinks.

Rashid Zaman once assembled a team of friends to create an animated character called Bibek, but pressure from their families made several members drop out just as the project began.

He carried on with his nieces and nephews, producing a one-minute sample that he showed to Channel i, which began airing it between news segments. When the channel stopped broadcasting and other animation work proved hard to sustain, he shut the studio down. "I didn't want to do animation for others. I wanted to do our own things," he says.

He wanted to train people, and to challenge the idea that working from a young age is embarrassing. Coffee, one of his personal interests, offered a way in: "What if we created a cafe where people could come, make things, be introduced to new things, come up with new ideas, and help change the culture?" It took nearly six months to work out the concept. At its core was his belief that "behind everything there can be a design process."

Kolpokar is, unexpectedly, coming to an end—not because the concept doesn't work. Clients keep returning, new products keep selling, and the plan had been to open branches in Dhanmondi and Bashundhara. It was making that expansion happen in Bangladesh that proved impossible.

Rashid's journey with the space began with an education licence, registered as a training centre. The longer-term plan was to add a cafe—he's a coffee enthusiast—and he had already ordered a coffee machine from abroad when Covid hit.

Almost every desk has a child busy with colourful filament coils, making something of their own.

The space sat empty for almost two years. Rashid used the time to train staff, but when they tried to formalise the cafe, the complications began. A city corporation official said the coffee machine alone meant they needed a fast-food licence. Registration then raised a VAT problem: the organisation had almost no income but faced monthly costs of Tk20,000–30,000. A lawyer advised declaring a lower rent—"This is the rule here. Everyone does it"—and Rashid, after objecting, eventually did.

The next day, a VAT officer questioned his employees about the real rent while Rashid was away, then demanded Tk5,000 a month. That was a line Rashid wouldn't cross—he'd pay whatever the law required, but nothing unofficial.

The Fire Department was next, repeatedly telling him the building lacked fire permission. On one visit, an official didn't explain what extinguisher was needed—just handed over a supplier's phone number.

Gigi faced a different problem: staff turnover. "A lot of visitors come to our cafe. I'm the main person who trains them—how to use a 3D pen, a 3D printer, and how to host and interact with customers," she says. "If I train 10, only one will stick around. They just leave, even though there is a contract."

Families often disapprove, she says. "In the Philippines, even high school students work at McDonald's. There's an ecosystem where families accept that. Here, we give staff and interns an allowance, but for maybe six years we've trained dozens of people, and only a few have stayed."

These experiences changed how Rashid and Gigi thought about expansion: each new branch would mean fighting the same battles again and again. The Philippines, where Gigi is from, became the next adventure instead.

For regular patron Tanita Ali, Kolpokar is more than a creative space. She works nearby and has brought her daughter, Amira, now eight, almost weekly since Amira was four and a half. Over time she introduced her parents too—her mother, a painter, bonded with Amira there.

The closure has hit them hard. Amira keeps asking, "Where will I go now?" Tanita says few nearby places offer the same kind of creative experience: "There may be playgrounds and other recreational spaces, but very few places where children can engage with art and creativity in this way."