Photographer: Francesca Iovene

In the city center of Pantin near Paris, a 1935 building has been ingeniously converted into a specialty coffee shop and roastery by the Italian-Mexican architectural design firm Office Abrami Rojas. The architects, fond of existing buildings with a story to tell, saw an opportunity to build a unique interior design that would honor the original construction.

«After exposing the walls and the supporting structure, we discovered and enhanced the magnificent reinforced concrete and glass domes, which were hidden until then by insulating panels.»

A continuous dialogue with the client and the craftsmen led to ambitious solutions. Custom-made steel furniture and terracotta cladding shapes a minimalist space, where the patina of time becomes a tapestry in shades of beige. The existing enhances the new, and vice versa. Natural light enters through the domes designed by architect René Tanalias (1898 - 1985) in the Art Deco style, while minimalist light design emphasizes the geometry of these double-height spaces.

The laboratory, delimited by large glass surfaces, separates the tasting area from the offices. The three spaces are now visually and physically connected, allowing the perception of the building’s layout and the concatenation of coffee roasting, sales, and tasting operations. This sequence is underlined by the succession of Euclidean geometric shapes of the domes – ellipse, square, and circle – which were naturally incorporated into the architecture. Transparency, natural light, reverence for the “dejà-là”, and handcrafted materials are the soul of this project.

Transparency, natural light, reverence for the existing, and handcrafted materials are the ingredients of this project.