Neighborhoods

Did I ever show you guys pictures of the coffee shop I finished over a year ago? My friend Rachel posted an instagram of it last week and it made me wonder if I ever showed the completed project? 

Here was the rendering I posted.

And here are a few quick shots I took a few days before she opened. 

 I had a really cool shelving unit designed for that niche where the Odwalla cooler is. Darn you, Odwalla rep and your "free" refrigerators, you ruined my life that week. I got over it.

If you remember, my client told me she wanted it to look "country". Which both scared me and, being from the South, excited me. She's from Montana, different kind of country. Country ended up being embodied by the toile wallpaper, which made my life long Southern Living reading heart happy. Not a lot of toile in Boston.

The frames are Ikea and I printed black and white images of the coffee bean growers she purchases from for $3/image at Kinkos. The picture rail really made me happy and gave us a nice point to terminate the wallpaper. The chairs are from Overstock, and I found the tables on Craig's List for $200. The benches are two church pews, also from Craig's List, $50. The flooring is VCT, the cheapest flooring in the whole world. I do not try to make it my calling card or anything, but I can find a good deal:)

The work counters are butcher block. The fascade is sort of a modified ships lap. She could not afford to do real hardwood floors, so this was my way of kind of adding that element back in.

For anyone curious, we used Corian Raincloud and it's held up fabulously to 

probably thousands of coffee spills.

The lights are from Ikea. I wish I would have cleaned that sneeze guard before I took this one:)

This is not an old building. It's a new building actually, built to replace a building that burned down. But there were two little slivers of brick from the facade that were exposed when it was just studs and I told the contractor that we had to keep those. And so we did. And they are my favorite corners.

The lights are hard to see in this shot but they are from Home Depot, the Home Decorators collection. When we walk by at night on our way home from our city garden it makes me so happy to look inside here.

Little story about the curtains; in commercial spaces you have to use fire rated fabrics. As I have spelled out in the above, this project was on a shoe string budget, but I really thought she needed some little curtains. So I found some inexpensive gingham, sprayed it with THIS spray we found on Amazon. We had to pay to have it tested per fabric, thus the reason we went sans lining. But it passed! I was pumped. It was the cherry on top of my super budget cake.

Commercial bathrooms are never that cute, but these walls are still my favorite. 

 I would love to get a real photographer in here, but one lesson I have learned is; if you are going to shoot a commercial space, like a coffee shop, do it before it opens. The space was actually on an episode of the show House Hunters. We have basic cable so I did not get to see it, but it aired late last year. The couple was house hunting in Boston and chose to visit Neighborhoods to "get to know the area" a little better. House Hunters also filmed in one of the condos I renovated last year in Brookline. Isn't that weird? Two totally unrelated projects.

But go check it out yourself! Neighborhoods Cafe. 96 Peterborough St. in Fenway. The Spanish latte is the bomb.