The coffee house — a centuries-old institution in Vienna and the favorite place to rendezvous for a cross-section of society. Here beats the pulse of Austria’s capital. But what does the contemporary coffee house look like — fresh, yet timeless? Inviting by day and seriously cool at night? Delicious food and incredible drinks? Relaxation and culture combined? The new Café Kandl in Kandlgasse 12 in the 7th district shows us how it’s done!
At the end of 2018, on learning that the aging Café Kandl, an outdated restaurant with garden in Vienna’s 7th district, had been abandoned, our client instantly recognized its potential and seized the opportunity. They rented the restaurant and started on a prompt refurbishment. The plan was a contemporary Viennese coffee house: timeless and yet exciting, a family-friendly café with delicious breakfasts and lunches by day, and the best cocktail bar in Vienna by night. But how to achieve these two completely different atmospheres? How to combine the classic and the modern? The IFUB* found the answer within the Café Kandl Twist, harnessing both the structurally immutable and the transformable to make the seemingly impossible, possible.
The structural twist: Two linear design elements divide three of the five square rooms into two very contrasting areas. The coffee house on the one side with its artistic oak parquet flooring and classic-yet-contemporary design turns the main seating area into a peaceful haven.
The bar and the WCs on the other side counter this with exuberance and joie de vivre — the black and white ripples on the floor and exciting colors and materials are enough to make corks fly. And at the dividing lines, mirrors extend the space and blur boundaries...
The atmospheric twist: A more flexible way of transforming the space. Whoever is in the café at 15:30 can experience it firsthand — this is when the bright and friendly café-restaurant becomes a cool, classy cocktail bar. The dark-red curtains behind the bar are drawn, closing the view to the kitchen and muting the noise. At the same time, the lights are dimmed and set to a color that invokes the evening atmosphere. Instead of fantastic food, there are now fantastic cocktails: The Café Kandl Twist — live and in color.
