The Divine Inversion
As a gift from the Divine, light is the giver of life to many things…
from a growing crop
to drying fruit
to a tree shading one’s afternoon nap
There’s a history of cultures and sacred elements in architecture.
Some call them Divine Geometry….The position for mere humans stuck living between death and an afterlife.
Celebrating this absurd human condition and integrating the brand’s humor, we asked a simple question:
What if Coffee is a gift from the Divine?
The location of this shop, situated a short distance from the Great Pyramids, we made an offering.
The Grand Pour Over.
Published with Bowerbird
Photography by Scott Magic
Architecture by Magic Architecture
For other African cafes click here
The store occupies a small area within a luxury shopping center. Using the space’s limitations, the architecture became a gesture, a super-scaled coffee filter shaped soffit. From the soffit’s bottom, light beams onto the countertop and a steam shaped softened edge above an orange espresso machine. A textured half-circle dark blue tile provides contrast and ties into the Brown Nose Coffee’s brand colors.
For this growing local coffee company, the coffee and its craft becomes theatre with a comical bent.
Maybe good coffee is a gift from the Gods?
Questions and Answers
What were the key challenges?
This project faced a heavy hand of challenges. There were 3 big mountains to face.
1) Does Social Media Connect People? – Social media is many many things. And strangely enough, Instagram bridged oceans and multiple cultural barriers to connect us with the founders of Brown Nose Coffee.
2) Being Hired During a Pandemic – To begin, we were commissioned in the fall of 2020 to design this shop, while the pandemic reached around the world limiting in person interaction.
3) Designing something without any control – This was our first project using the metric system, working with an international client and crossing our fingers that everything will work out.
And it did.
Key products used:
> Egyptian glazed half-round tile
> Lime Plaster
> Stainless Steel counters
What was the brief?
Design small coffee shop for a premier Egyptian coffee company within a luxury shopping development.
Who are the clients and what’s interesting about them?
We would have never accepted this as a project, but Brown Nose Team created an incredible brand, sophistication, great product and for a sense of humor. From top down, the brand is about being serious, but not taking yourself too seriously. And that is what we loved.