The Espresso Lab - Roastery
Designers | The Espresso Lab Specialty Design & Consultation Division
Location | Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Launch date | July 1, 2020
The Espresso Lab Roastery is a specialty coffee house and roastery that aims to highlight the exceptional journey that coffee goes through. It was important for us to establish a space that is welcoming, and one that embodies the spirit of education and promotes the fine art of speciality coffee making.
Lines, lights, and shadows mingle and interplay to call subtle attention to the “floating surfaces design”, a seemingly gravity defying feature which we employed for our creative direction of the space.
One of our main goals was to be environmentally friendly. The bar, which is the main showpiece of the design, is finished in highly durable eco-friendly porcelain, providing a superior working surface that is naturally non-permeable, making it extremely easy to sanitize and disinfect (especially helpful in light of COVID-19). The porcelain used is made of natural clay that is fired at very high temperatures resulting in a tough material that retains its look and lustre indefinitely even under the heavy daily stress of a busy speciality coffee house.
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The bar area has been carefully designed to give the best conditions for baristas, allowing them to work with precision and speed.
The masterfully built 8 meter cantilever above the brewing space was a particular challenge because of its massive size and weight, but the result is an engineering art piece that holds a specially calibrated stretch light which provides the perfect lighting conditions to brew and prepare - a boon for the perfectionists behind and around the bar.
Organic textures, materials, and colors were measured in such a way to discreetly blend and become a backdrop that puts people and coffee on the foreground, which is ultimately what it's all about.
