Café Younes is a specialty roaster serving the best coffees from around the world since 1935 in Beirut. Besides coffee retail, the roaster shop in Hamra—Beirut’s cosmopolitan vibrant center—provides coffee aficionados with a small sidewalk space for sipping coffee, a quick break, or a meeting on the run.
As coffee aficionados and regular Café Younes customers ourselves, we proposed to redesign the sidewalk sitting area of the café to enhance circulation and include more people. The sidewalk area is a high-density micro urban space that lies in front of the roaster shop and at the corner of 2 sidewalks. The existing furniture comprised of basic-design, high tables and stools lined on the internal edges of the sidewalks.
Our design intervention proposed to build on the spirit of the café’s sidewalk area to increase interactivity and employ a more efficient use of the micro space. The new furniture layout follows the site edges including those of the sidewalks, the tree planter, and the nearby shop. The design also gives importance to the only tree facing the shop as a central feature of the sitting area. This way, we obtained a longer edge that can host more people and that creates a seating mass away from the shop’s door, freeing the circulation space in and out of the shop.
Design wise, the new tables form one, single-level, continuous surface that brings people around the tree or facing each other. Besides spatial efficiency, the design is meant to be low-maintenance against usage and weather corrosion (being an open space during the rainy/cold and sunny/hot seasons). We used heavy-duty fraké wood protected with polyurethane paint in manufacturing the tables and refurbishing the old stools. The light-brown color of the fraké wood is also compatible with the identity of the shop.