Designing a room for staying

Most cafés are designed for turnover. Ours is designed for the opposite. When we renovated the space in 2023, we wrote one sentence on the architect's brief: a guest should lose track of time here, pleasantly.

So the clocks went. The lighting follows the day — cool and bright before noon, amber after four. The chairs by the arched windows are deliberately the most comfortable in the room, because that's where people read.

Plants do quiet work too. They soften sound, divide the room into corners without walls, and give solo guests something alive to sit beside. We doubled them within the first month, and the average visit grew by twenty minutes.

Twenty minutes of someone's unhurried morning is, as far as we're concerned, the best review a café can get.