A commercial interior design space for Blue Bottle Coffee's first Toronto location (108 Dundas St W, Toronto). The brand's identity insinuates there is an "art to coffee", and the design brings together the simplistic aesthetic of Blue Bottle's interiors with an exhibition-style space, which displays the act of receiving, making, drinking and buying.
Blue Bottle Coffee’s identity frames itself around the origin story of one of the first known coffee shops in history - the Blue Bottle coffeehouse in Vienna. For the brand, coffee is viewed as a treasure of sorts, a products which should be respected and well prepared. Priding themselves on the quality of their beans, Blue Bottle Coffee aims to deliver the freshest coffee to their customers, removing the obstacles to do so. This proposed design for Toronto’s first Blue Bottle Coffee store creates an exhibition-style coffee shop, showcasing the art of coffee. The design navigates the customer through layered sheets of glass, hanging linen and simple wood furnishings, creating a circulatory experience of the senses whilst adhering to the brand’s existing aesthetics and philosophy.
In order to create an exhibition like experience, my spatial gestures have played with shifts in scale throughout the store. The store itself is one level but two storeys tall, lifting up the ceiling by double and immediately creating a more grand, open spatial experience. Because these gestures are enlarged in scale, the customer feels as if they are walking into a space greater than themselves - as a museum or gallery would evoke those same feelings. Upon entry, three large glass panes act as partition walls in the space, navigating the customer to order and receive their coffee at the counter.
The draped linen feature hangs from the ceiling creating shifts in height through the store. The hanging fabric drapes down quite far (2m or around 6.5ft) however because of the height of the entire store, it does not interfere with the programmatic experience of the customer. Emulating the fabric of coffee filters, the linen is draped over wooden dowels attached to the concrete walls, running all the way down to the end of the store. The hanging fabric navigates the sight lines of the interior, and the eye is drawn to the back wall where the large, shelving display is situated. Once again, the scale is played up, creating a very large, almost sculptural display. The display will be used as practical shelving in the open shelves for Blue Bottle Coffee’s products as well as for specialty items on the shelves closed off in glass.
