A Cafe and Coffee Shop Awash in Odes to Ellsworth Kelly, Absalon, Rothko, and More

The firm’s first hospitality project draws from the compositional rigor of Rothko, the restraint of Giorgio Morandi, and the hard-edged geometry of Ellsworth Kelly to organize a shifting sequence of spaces. A circular banquette reads like a Kelly fragment rendered in custom micro-cement, while a green stucco volume in the back channels still-life logic to enclose the service spaces. Booth and Gagliardi shape the front-of-house like a soft-edged color field, where a Turrell-like ceiling and a collaborative communal table provide room for both introspection and performance. Owners Jessica Tjeng and Bart Ackermans, longtime travelers with a warm affinity for coffee rituals, envisioned a home-adjacent neighborhood gathering space—one with a sense of place that evolves from open and energetic to cloistered and intimate as the day goes on.

Tjeng and Ackermans worked with Almost Studio to carve the space into a procession of architectural “rooms”—not with walls, but with color fields, material shifts, and volumes that act like furniture. A soft green stucco box holds the kitchen and back-of-house like a still life, while more public zones nod to Absalon’s Cellule structures—distinct units held within one quiet envelope.

Each architectural move references something slightly unexpected: Hopewell earthworks, a Prada runway, the math of communal gathering. But the space stays grounded in feel over theory. Guests might not clock the references, but they’ll feel the rhythm—the way materials abut, the way texture shifts when you move through thresholds.