Brown Nose Coffee

Scott Magic

• Architects

The Divine Inversion

As a gift from the Divine, light is the giver of life to many things...
from a growing crop
to drying fruit
to a tree shading one's afternoon nap

There's a history of cultures and sacred elements in architecture.

Some call them Divine Geometry....The position for mere humans stuck living between death and an afterlife.

Celebrating this absurd human condition and integrating the brand's humor, we asked a simple question:

What if Coffee is a gift from the Divine?

The location of this shop, situated a short distance from the Great Pyramids, we made an offering.

The Grand Pour Over.

The store occupies a small area within a luxury shopping center. Using the space's limitations, the architecture became a gesture, a super-scaled coffee filter shaped soffit. From the soffit's bottom, light beams onto the countertop and a steam shaped softened edge above an orange espresso machine. A textured half-circle dark blue tile provides contrast and ties into the Brown Nose Coffee's brand colors.

For this growing local coffee company, the coffee and its craft becomes theatre with a comical bent.

Maybe good coffee is a gift from the Gods?

This project faced a heavy hand of challenges. There were 3 big mountains to face.

1) Does Social Media Connect People? - Social media is many many things. And strangely enough, Instagram bridged oceans and multiple cultural barriers to connect us with the founders of Brown Nose Coffee.

2) Being Hired During a Pandemic - To begin, we were commissioned in the fall of 2020 to design this shop, while the pandemic reached around the world limiting in person interaction.

3) Designing something without any control - This was our first project using the metric system, working with an international client and crossing our fingers that everything will work out.

And it did.