This New York bar serves only coffee, tea and soft drinks but one bleary-eyed look around and you’d be forgiven for thinking you’d been sipping something far stronger.
In a move that’s more Hollywood blockbuster than high-street chain, this Manhattan coffee shop appears to have been flipped on to its side.
Producing something that looks like the disorientatingly cool brainchild of artist MC Escher and Inception director Chris Nolan wasn’t what D’Espresso owner Eugene Kagansky initially had in mind when he thrashed out the plans for his second New York espresso bar. Taking his cue from the nearby New York Public Library, he asked the architects for an ‘interesting’ space inspired by books. And he certainly got it.
The designers at the Nema Workshop ingeniously created the illusion that the pokey room had been turned on its side by fitting the floor, ceiling and walls with a full-size sepia photograph of bookshelves printed on to glazed tiles. They then covered the back wall with a ‘floor’ coated in brown herringbone pattern opposite a set of gravity-defying lamps that jut out from behind the bar to resemble an inverted ceiling.
Directly inspired by the spinning camera scenes in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, it’s a breathtaking piece of innovation, and Kagansky even plans to give his next D’Espresso branch an upside-down theme.
He’s clearly out to turn the average morning cuppa into an engagingly artistic experience. And make even the hardiest espresso-slurping jitter-addict switch to decaf along the way.
