‘What is the “why?” behind your endeavor?’
3rd Wave Coffee Bar Millwork, Zinc Bar&Interior

“How do I express my love and passion for third wave coffee in my cafe?”

My client Pavel loves Third Wave Coffee. Ok, we both do. So he is preaching to the choir when he explains to me that the gentle roasting reveals the inherent flavor by accentuating the essence, the terroir, of a particular varietal coffee bean. He counters that Starbucks approaches it in an industrial manner through buying huige quantities of various coffees and heavily roasting the different beans to make them taste the same. The third wave approach on the other hand, he says, promotes a direct relationship between farmer and coffee drinker and, thus, a sustainable farm-to-table ethos. How can we express this in the design of his cafe?

Good architecture–the kind we aim for–extrudes the unique characteristics of your particular lifestyle and situation and expresses them with effects that delight, energize and renew (just like a cup of carefully crafted small batch coffee). We call it detail and effect. Both endeavors think through every detail of the process to create something beautiful. For Pavel’s cafe we took locally sourced birch and, using the great master George Nakashima as inspiration. arranged and expressed the grain in a wabi sabi fashion to make a compelling pattern. A zinc bar, a display case and new IKEA lighting frame a place to make coffee, conversation and friends.

Contractor: Jeremy Kirk and Sons

Photographer: Gregory Scott