Fitting Out a Narrow Cafe Without Making It Feel Narrow

Kettlebrook Coffee Rooms occupies a former chemist's shop. Three metres wide, eleven deep, one door at the front and a staff corner at the back. The brief was warm, calm, seats for twenty, and a room that didn't feel like a corridor.

We said the last part couldn't be solved with decoration. It had to be solved with the plan.

Spend the width once

In a narrow room, every object that stands in the middle is a decision about the path. So we gave the width to one thing: the walkway. Nothing else stands in the middle of the floor. No tables, no stools, no planters.

All seating moved to the wall. A single bench in pale oak runs down the left side for eight metres, with the tables slotted in at the edge of it. A shorter row of stools sits against the right wall at a ledge. The centre stays clear, so the eye can travel to the back of the room without bumping into anything.

Light the walls, not the ceiling

Narrow rooms look narrower under ceiling lights, because the light pools on the floor and the walls recede. We lit the walls instead. A line of small pendants hangs at head height along the bench, and a continuous wash of light runs down the plaster on the right.

The result is that the room feels wider than it is. Your eye reads the lit surfaces as the boundaries, and since they're bright and a little further apart than the dark ones would have been, the room opens.

What we left out

The client wanted a feature wall, a mural and a library of vintage cups on shelves. We argued for none of them. Instead there's one plain shelf near the back with twelve cups on it, all the same, all white. The cups are the decoration. The cleanness is the point.

We also dropped the idea of a second counter. A narrow room can take one counter and one queue, and the queue has to fit. The counter at Kettlebrook runs only as far as the espresso machine, and the till sits on the end of it so nobody stands in a line looking at someone else's coffee.

Materials in short

• Oak for the bench, the ledge and the counter top, left oiled and unsealed

• Lime-wash on the walls, in a soft stone colour

• Polished concrete for the floor, poured in a single piece with no thresholds

• Brass for the door handle and the pendants, which will age

Four materials. That's about the limit for a room this size.

After six months

The owners wrote to say they now get asked whether they extended the building. They didn't. They simply stopped furnishing the middle.

We tend to measure a good fit-out by what people don't notice: nobody mentions the plan, nobody remarks on the width. They sit down, they stay a bit longer than they meant to, and they come back.