Back with another update. There’s been plenty happening this week with our new project in full swing. With initial project planning fully sorted this week we’ve turned our heads to the design and style of the cafe.

Design, Style and Layout

Before going out and buying furniture or anything like that it’s really important to take a moment to set some clear goals for what the style and vibe of your cafe is going to be. An unorganised approach to the look and feel can make the space feel confused and off the mark.

Here are some good things to think about when creating your goals:

• Your customers (Think about who they are, what they do and what they need)
• Your space (Are there any constraints, is there something pre existing that you need to work with)
• Your passions (It’s always important to stay true to yourself and stick to things you love)

With clientele on our latest project being a mixture of local residents and office workers it was really important to us to create a fun and relaxed space where people felt comfortable both relaxing or coming in for a meeting.

So softening the industrial themes of the container felt like a good way to achieve this. Introducing some rustic wood elements is a great way to achieve this without contrasting to much with the container. We found some recycled pallet tables which had the exact feel we were after. Rustic wood table top with a sharp steel frame leg (see our mood board pictured below).

Style mood board

A great way to stumble across ideas like this is to head onto Pinterest and start typing ideas into the search feature. It gives you real examples of styles and combinations that have worked. Feel free to head there and follow us.

Table Design

Finally ‘Ground Truthing’. A very simple yet important practice to make sure you’ve perfectly mapped out the space and whats going in it. You need to actually get out onsite measure the space and cross check with the size of your seating, tables and other furniture. Such a simple thing to do often gets overlooked  Believe me you can make some pretty embarrassing mistakes sometimes when you don’t go out and check the actual space.

Hope you got some value out of this week’s update. Next week there’ll be even more to chat about – including an actual look at the location.