Café culture: slow down, connect

There is a table by the window at the front of the shop that we have been asked to remove twice — once by a consultant, once by a friend who runs a much busier café than ours. It seats two, it is the best light in the room, and it is occupied for most of the day by people who order one drink and stay for an hour.

We kept it, and we will keep it, because it is the whole point.

The economics of staying

A café that optimises purely for throughput ends up with hard chairs, loud music and no power sockets. It works. It also produces a room nobody wants to be in, and it quietly trains your regulars to order at the door and leave.

Our version of the maths is longer. Someone who sits for an hour on Tuesday is someone who brings three colleagues on Thursday. We would rather have forty people who feel like the room belongs to them than four hundred who feel processed by it.

What we actually design for

Chairs you can sit in for ninety minutes. Enough hard surfaces to keep the room lively and enough soft ones to stop it echoing. Sockets on two walls. And a counter low enough that you can see the person making your drink and say something to them if you want to.

The part we cannot design

The rest of it is not ours. It is the two regulars who discovered they went to the same school. It is the writer in the corner on Thursdays. All we can really do is put the table by the window and leave it there.