Bori Coffeehouse at Food Art Fair

London’s 18th-century coffeehouses are remembered as the rooms where modern democracy and capitalism took shape. They ran on colonial extraction. Coffeehouse reclaims the format for Afro-diasporic producers, makers and thinkers. I designed the pavilion it served from: a working café counter, CNC-cut from eucalyptus hardwood ply and built flat-pack.

The arch comes from the portal, a threshold that lends whoever stands in it a sense of occasion. Here, that is the barista, working as a griot. Card models tested directions, and a single face with an arch cut through it won, because it framed the person serving, carry the counter and hold an archive either side

At Ladbroke Hall it stood and drew people in. Ethiopian coffee came from the counter, Chef Yemss served European café classics hijacked with African flavours, and a floating archive of texts, images and artworks by diasporic practitioners. Every order could open into the story the pavilion was built to tell: who the coffeehouse is for.

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