This School Turned Coffee Shop is an Adaptive Reuse Gem

In 1936, the Public Works Administration completed a beautiful Art Deco building in South Philadelphia to house a vocational school with a range of offerings, from culinary arts to welding and bricklaying. Just shy of a century later, in 2013 the school closed; developer Scout LTD eventually bought the space with the idea of transforming it into a new home for the city’s vibrant community of makers.

All those artists need fuel, of course. So local architecture and design firm Kaminski + Pew carved out a space on the ground floor for independent cafe, Two Persons Coffee. “Our goal was to create a space that intentionally blurs the narrative of place and time,” explain firm cofounders Kevin Kaminski and Alexis Pew. “We wanted to invite a sense of wonder. What is existing? What is new?”

As for what’s already on hand, the answer is: Almost everything. To recast some 300 square feet of what once was an auto body tool room into the coffee shop, the team relocated, wire-brushed, cleaned, and painted the school’s existing fencing. Granite panels, removed from walls and resurfaced, is the face and top of Two Persons Coffee’s monumental counter. Classroom furniture takes on a new life as café seating. “The biggest challenge was finding a contractor willing to salvage and repurpose materials from the building,” add Kaminski and Pew. “Conor Roche from ROC buildings was up to the task and a great partner.” The walls and ceiling, they say, “are clear coated to preserve the existing patina and make the space safe for food.”

And as for the design duo’s second question? “The small but mighty coffee shop quickly developed into a destination,” they share. Not just for the tenants of the building—50% of which are women-owned and 80% of which are self-owned—including spaces for furniture makers, tattoo artists, painting studios, designers of all disciplines, and charitable organizations. But also for locals in the area. “Two Persons has become a vital hub,” note Kaminski and Pew, “for both the building and surrounding community.” A good lesson, then, in adaptive reuse.

Transforming an Industrial Building into a Creative Hub

Alfred Coffee Sails Into Marina Del Rey With Nautical Design

Shamelessly nautical, cheeky, and punctuated with precise craftsmanship, Alfred Coffee’s newest location in Marina Del Rey, which opened in January 2023, plays up its waterside location. The seventh in a series from design firm Studio Sucio, the 1,000-square-foot storefront pairs expansive vertical space with intuitive programming and an Americana palette.

Since opening his first Alfred Coffee on Melrose Place in 2013, founder and CEO Josh Zad, has prided himself on deliberate, individual design. With shops throughout Los Angeles, Austin, and San Francisco, as well as Kuwait City, Alfred’s Instagram-worthy interiors continue to attract coffee- and design-lovers alike.

“Alfred shops always have an exuberant feeling to them,” says Studio Sucio principal Leslie Barrett. With seven completed and three in the works, Barrett and cofounder, Fernando Bracer, have mastered the art of translating the brand’s key features, like its signage and black-and-white awning, into unique customer experiences. Alfred Robertson evokes an upscale Italian gelateria, while Alfred Malibu looks more like a meditative surf shack.

“When we start a new Alfred, we look at the location and context” Barret says. “Alfred Marina Del Rey called for camp and we just went for it.”

Spacecraft Designs a Zero Waste Coffee Shop in Bangkok

A community gathering space and premier example of sustainable design, Early BKK café, a two-story coffee shop in Saphan Sung, Bangkok, was forged from local upcycled materials. Milk cartons mixed with plywood, known as re-board, were cleverly utilized for the door, ceiling, and furnishings while 600 beer bottles frame its facade.

“The owner called us to design the cafe and mentioned her intention to use only recycled materials,” says Spacecraft co-founder Sathika Jienjaroonsri, who grew up in the same neighborhood the cafe is located in. “She wanted to provide a space for villagers to have their daily coffee, as well as foreigners and other Thai people. It’s also pet-friendly” Now, a landmark of the community, Early BKK café has become a hub for both socialization and education.

Not only does Early BKK café provide an important place for Saphan Sung’s multigenerational residents, but it showcases what can be created when you think outside-the-box.

Early BKK Café Takes Upcycled Design to New Levels

A Classic Coffee Machine Informs the Design of This Chic Café in Kazakhstan

For the specialty coffee shop Julius, tucked into the heart of Kazakhstan’s Almaty neighborhood, a classic La Marzocco coffee machine wasn’t just an essential piece of culinary equipment: it was the inspiration for the entire design. When ABR Group asked the New Architects of Almaty Workshop (NAAW) team to brew up the look of the 450-square-foot café, they looked to the machine’s red exterior for the signature front door and accents, including the logo and brand identity.

Coffee itself inspired the material palette of rich wood and creamy vaulted ceilings. German clinker bricks also take pride of place. “This is exciting for us, how the material works in different ways,” says Elvira Bakubayeva, architect and NAAW cofounder. “They transition from the entrance steps outside to the internal flooring and up to the countertop of the coffee bar,” forming a kind of stage for the coffee machine and all it can do.

This Café by Roar Has Us Seeing Shades of Gray

A serene, monochrome palette enlivened by the sophisticated play of different textures characterizes Drop Coffee’s first outpost in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates—the second café that Dubai-based studio Roar has designed for the homegrown Emirati brand. “We wanted the new Drop location to have a different feel from the one we designed in Dubai last year while visually incorporating similar design references such as the materiality and subtle organic forms,” Roar founder and creative director Pallavi Dean says. 

This translates into an interior that, like J.M. Whistler’s iconic painting of his mother, could accurately be tilted Arrangement in Gray and Black. All the 1,200-square-foot café’s walls are coated with custom paint that emulates the color and texture of rough concrete, while the floor is covered with terrazzo-effect tiles in a similar tonality. The fragments in the terrazzo are echoed by shards of mirror embedded in multiple domes that dot the dark-painted ceiling. Each indentation is hung with spherical pendant lights, which float like luminous planets in a star-strewn night sky. 

The inky darkness overhead is picked up in various custom elements below, which include a pair of drop-shape standing tables finished in black and a wall alcove trimmed with Nero Marquina marble. They are complemented by the soft glow of brushed stainless-steel, which not only clads a long communal table that snakes down the center of the space but also forms a series of half-moon shelves that emerge from one wall like an art installation.

Shades of gray and white also feature on the main bar, where textured paint is used to create an abstract pattern derived from magnified and manipulated images of spilled coffee. The same motif appears on joinery supporting wall banquettes that, like the café’s other seats—side chairs, stools, ottomans, even a lounger—are upholstered in greige or its analogues. A handful of honey-color oak accents stand in discreet counterpoint to the pervasive smokiness. 

The atmosphere may be cool, but natural light flooding through the all-glass storefront ensures the vibe is never chilly. And customers craving a direct hit of Emirati sunshine can sip their lattes at the tables and chairs that populate the outdoor area in front. 

Ippolito Fleitz Group–Identity Architects Creates a Vibrant Coffee Bar for Gen Zers in Munich

Young and dynamic. Straightforward yet detailed. That was the atmospheric goal—and result—for Ippolito Fleitz Group–Identity Architects at New Era, a coffee bar in Munich. Situated in the city’s Schwabing district, a vibrant student-populated neighborhood, Interior Design Hall of Fame members Gunter Fleitz and Peter Ippolito and their team strove to attract the Gen Z set starting from the street. Through the storefront’s glazing, passersby can catch glimpses of the rhythmic ceiling, a geometric landscape of gray, yellow, and teal cubes, actually printed and folded Forex boxes—a solution that’s at once chic, lightweight, and budget friendly. The energy continues to the wall-color palette, a spirited mix of lavender, peach, and royal blue, the latter reappearing on the café’s upholstered lounge chairs, placed in arrangements that suggest rooms within a room. Verdant live plants and barista workshops round out the 900-square-foot café, its offerings in step with its name.

Kellie Patry Serves Up Espresso Futurism Via Equator Coffees in Los Angeles

Los Angeles’s insatiable caffeine craving sees a newcomer to its burgeoning coffee culture. Equator Coffees, a stalwart of the NorCal scene with nine cafés heads south to open its tenth, a vibrant 1,400-square-foot shop at Culver City’s Ivy Station, a five-acre complex comprising HBO’s new 240,000-square-foot headquarters, residential, retail, and hotel The Shay. Credit designer Kellie Patry, a veteran in the coffee and cocktail arena, with the literal and figurative buzz.

Female-founded in 1995 by Helen Russell and Brook McDonnell, Equator identifies as third-wave coffee, i.e. a product dedicated to high quality, sustainability, and the importance of everyone in the supply chain, customers included. Even though it’s an esteemed commodity in the Bay Area, Equator made no consistent design or branding statement tying together its locations. Good news for Patry. She had a clean slate to create an LA presence “from scratch in a massive new corporate building.”

Maverick ideas fueled her imagination. First came the notion of steam. Sure, it creates foam for espresso and macchiato drinks. For Patry it went beyond, leading to thoughts of steam engines for trains, which led to motion, which conjured up visions of Futurism, the early 20th-century Italian art movement celebrating dynamism and energy. In fact, she shared images of canvases by Tullio Cralli with Interior Design to make the point and aptly nicknamed her project “espresso futurism.”

The coffee bar, a prime example, has its front lacquered in raised horizontal stripes of blue, gray, and Equator’s signature red to suggest forward action. Meanwhile, more of that brilliant Ferrari red comes at the lacquered steel counter. Thomas Williams’s mural of integrally colored, custom cement tiles, stretching behind and wrapping a perpendicular wall, suggests energetic movement, too. In this case it’s ocean waves. 

“With all this color I designed the space for people in film,” Patry notes. “The industry has an appreciation for it.”  So, creatives from HBO and Amazon’s nearby film and television studio, as well as folks using the adjacent Metro station (its stair wall coincidentally crimson) grab their drinks from La Marzocco KB90, “a beast of a machine” and head to seating either indoors or out. Custom curvilinear benches, tables, and millwork are red oak in varying stains; chairs and stools are powder-coated steel. Overlooking the interior, Poul Henningson’s PH5 pendants supplement Los Angeles’s famed daylight penetrating glass walls. Maybe most special of all is the aluminum tiger surveying the scene from above. The backlit piece is a female Bengal, and some of Equator’s profits go to protection of her species in nature. 

Perkins&Will Takes Home a Best of Year Award for Nemesis Coffee in Vancouver, Canada

2021 Best of Year winner for Hospitality – Coffee Counter

Comprising 10 petals of CNC-cut laminated timber clad in cherry-hued composite-aluminum shingles, this pavilion, an existing structure by Perkins&Will, is round in plan. After leasing it, Nemesis Coffee contacted the firm to design the 2,000-square-foot interior. The space “always wanted to be a coffee house,” senior associate Rufina Wu suggests. But the fit-out required finesse. “With our strongly sculptural building, the inside had to reference the architecture—and complement it.” Hence the feature ceiling element in which fins of white fabric stretch from a central oculus out toward the perimeter. LED strips spill soft light through the diffusing textile vanes for an effect that’s organic and calming while also echoing the exterior petals. The muted materials palette—glass, stainless steel, pale woods—creates a warm environment even on the city’s grayest days. Faced with pandemic supply-chain hiccups, the firm relied on a hometown fabricator for the curved birch-plywood paneling and a circular high table, its center planted with a tree. A stainless-steel bar slices through the middle of the plan, dividing the seating from the kitchen and service areas. Above, a continuous glass divider modulates from clear (for display cases) to reflective (concealing restrooms). “It reveals exactly what should be revealed,” Wu says, “and hides the rest.”

Perkins&Will: Ryan Bragg; Yehia Madkour; Rufina Wu; Mira Yung; Fargol Moshiri; Joanne Wong; Mahdiar Ghaffarian

Phoebe Says Wow Architects Brews Up a Coffeeshop With Sunny Accents in Taipei

2022 Best of Year Winner for Coffee/Tea

Taipei’s Xinyi district is home to a diverse community of businesspeople, residents, and hikers traveling through its bustling central business district to the picturesque hills nearby. One thing they have in common? A love for coffee, satiated with a perky aplomb by Fifteen Steps Workshop. 

Architects Phoebe Wen and Shihhwa Hung of Taipei’s Phoebe Says Wow firm have transformed its 860-square-foot café—tucked into a corner beneath a mixed-use building with one side facing the trails—into a minimalist expanse of white-on-white with jolts of buzzy yellow. A carved-in area defined by polycarbonate panels framed with painted steel frames creates both space and light for guests, who can gather at a standing bar, perch on stools tucked between pots of greenery, or relax on stepped seating out front while achieving their caffeine buzz. 

Behind the opaque panels, an invite-only multi-purpose room hosts cupping seminars among the working areas and roastery. And while yellow remains the sole accent color, the space is as green as can be: Breezes from the trails mix with the aroma of fresh coffee throughout the open area, reducing the need for AC. 

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Perkins&Will Turns to Geometry for a Coffee Shop at Emily Carr University of Art + Design

It could have posed an interior quandary. A pavilion in the public square serving Emily Carr University of Art + Design complex in Vancouver, BC, all by Perkins&Will, is round in plan, the structure consisting of 10 petals of CNC-cut laminated timber clad in cherry-hued shingles (thus its nickname, Red Pavilion). But after Nemesis Coffee leased the site, its third in the city, all in creative hubs, and contacted Perkins&Will via an Instagram direct message, the unusual container’s 2,000-square-foot interiors began to take shape. The space had “always wanted to be a coffee house,” senior associate Rufina Wu begins. But the fit-out required finesse. “With our strongly sculptural building, the inside had to reference the architecture—and also complement it.”

The Perkins&Will interiors team acknowledged the unusual geometry with a feature element on the ceiling. Starting with a central oculus, fins of white fabric stretch outward toward the perimeter. LED strips spill warm illumination through the fins, which are made from a textile used for dif­fusing light on film sets. The effect is both “organic,” Wu notes, and calming and echoes the exterior petals.

Perkins&Will selected a muted palette for the materials, the architect continues, to create a vibe that is welcoming, especially on Vancouver’s frequent gray days. The choices of glass, stainless steel, and pale woods were also affected by pandemic supply-chain hiccups. The firm relied on a hometown fabricator for the curved birch-plywood paneling and a circular high table, its center containing a leafy green tree.

In between all the swooshes is a highly functional eatery. A stainless-steel bar slices through the middle of the plan, dividing the seating from the kitchen and service areas. Above, a continuous glass divider modulates from clear (for display cases) to reflective (concealing restrooms). “It reveals exactly what should be revealed,” Wu says, “and hides the rest.” For those wanting to be seen, the café opens onto an outdoor patio furnished with recycled-plastic chairs.

Add tag via side panel: shingles (facade)

article: stools (café)

Andreu World: chairs

best film service: custom ceiling fins

tata: pendant fixtures

lumentruss: linear ceiling fixtures

systemalux: linear pendant fixtures

crl: display hardware

Blu Dot: seating (patio)

rempel bros: concrete flooring

thinkl lighting studio: lighting consultant

cft engineering: code consultant

p&b engineering: structural engineer

integral group: mep

uppercase architectural millwork and design: woodwork

goldray glass: glasswork

tetherstone construction: general contractor