Carucome SS
A café is not a coffee shop. A coffee shop sells a product. A café is a room people choose to be in — where the warmth of the surface underhand and the particular quiet of other people working are as much the offering as what arrives in the cup. A roastery is something else again: a place where the source is visible, where the industrial process and the domestic ritual occupy the same floor. Carucome SS asked for both to coexist without apology.
Introduction
The client had been roasting and serving coffee out of a converted unit for four years before the brief arrived. The operation had outgrown the space — not in volume, but in ambition. What they needed was a room that did justice to the seriousness of what they were doing: sourcing, roasting, and serving coffee at a standard that most of their customers had no framework to evaluate, but that they recognised immediately upon arrival.
The site was a ground-floor unit with a south-facing glazed elevation and a courtyard that had been used for storage. The brief asked for a café that opened to the courtyard, a roastery visible from the street, a retail shelf that displayed product without reducing the space to a shop, and a room that felt, at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday, like somewhere worth the journey.
Lead Architect
Jonas Thorne
Year Completed
2026
Floor Area
800 m²
Type
Commercial
The Problem
A roastery drum is not a piece of equipment that can be tucked away. It is 800 kilograms of cast iron and steel, it requires structural floor loading, dedicated ventilation, and clearance on four sides for operation and maintenance. It also runs at temperatures that make the surrounding air smell of the thing being made — which, in a coffee roastery, is an asset rather than a problem, and one worth designing around.
The roaster was positioned first. Everything else — the bar, the retail shelving, the seating — arranged itself around the decision of where the machine sat and what it faced. The black steel shelving grid that runs floor to ceiling on the roastery wall began as a structural response to the ventilation requirement and became the visual logic of the room: a framework that holds equipment, product, and the accumulated material of a serious operation without asking any of it to be tidy.
The courtyard elevation was the second constraint. The planning condition required the glazed façade to remain — a dark steel frame with fixed and opening lights that the brief could not alter. The outdoor seating, the retail display visible from the street, and the warm light from within were all designed to work with that frame rather than despite it.
The Making
The bar counter is the only curved element in the building. Everything else — the shelving, the cabinetry, the roaster, the tables — is rectilinear and deliberate. The curve at the bar is a practical one: it allows a single person to serve across the full counter run without repositioning, and it softens the corner where the customer and the operation meet without making that meeting sentimental.
The oak surfaces — bar counter, window ledge, shelving — are the only warm material in a room otherwise defined by concrete, steel, and glass. That ratio was chosen carefully. Enough warmth to make the space comfortable for the hour someone might spend with a coffee and a book. Not so much that the industrial seriousness of the roasting operation is diluted.
The courtyard was planted after the interior was resolved. The species were chosen for their tolerance of a hard urban microclimate — full sun on stone — and for the density they could achieve in containers. At capacity, the planting wraps the glazed façade on three sides, so the room visible through the glass appears to sit within a garden rather than on a pavement.
"We had been making serious coffee in a room that didn't reflect it. What we have now is a space that does the coffee justice — and that brings in people who wouldn't have found us otherwise. The room does the explaining we used to have to do ourselves."
The Founders, Carucome SS
