Many people know we work for a whole pile of trade and business magazines serving different industries. This is from

On Office magazine, May 2007.  This is a style magazine for workplace architects and designers.

Corporate Coffee Bars – Ian Boughton

Architects must be kept away from the coffee bar. This is not a ploy to keep designers at their desks – it is the belief by the catering trade that while the corporate in-house coffee bar grows in popularity, the layout of these cafes has to be kept out of the hands of workplace designers.

The arrival of the high street coffee bar into the corporate building is still a growing trend. Workplace guru Jeremy Myerson saw it start ten years ago, telling of the Swedish corporate chief who pioneered the workplace coffee lounge and said “I don’t care if my staff are sitting in my café, if that’s where they have their ideas!”

In Britain, a less positive general driver is avoiding staff absenteeism by those slipping out to the high street coffee bar three or four times a day. Cafes are sometimes used strategically - at Astra Zeneca's UK headquarters, Claremont Design sited the bar in the central atrium, knowing the client was bringing together two workforces who had to be encouraged to interact.

However, adequate space is a rare luxury. Caterers moan that they never get enough space in a corporate building.   

It is not a design matter alone, says Nick Parker of Bite Catering, who argues that the unusual business model demands the coffee trade be involved before the designer   “If you believe the industry yardstick of an average of 4.5 cups of coffee drunk per office worker per day, then for an office of 500 people, the annual value is anything up to £565,000.

“That’s why we ask clients to consider a ‘coffee strategy’ for their whole building - a mix of vended coffee (possibly free), hospitality coffee, and coffee bar, with the relative service styles thought through for maximum take-up - hence not just ‘design a coffee bar’, but ‘plan a coffee strategy’.

In practice, Dave Booth of café designers Nexus Interiors reports having been expected to create a working café bar in a disused storage cupboard at the end of the longest dead end corridor in a building, and Chris Piper, sales director at contract caterer Artizian, voices the general industry view, that “the biggest problem is being hit with a pre-ordained space, with very little rhyme or reason to it. That’s why we have been given one area suitable for 170, in a building where we are supposed to cater for 2,500, and another area that can hold 300, in a building which employs only 600!

“In any situation where an architect has designed the catering environment, you find it’s planned for aesthetics, and not for practical workflow.”

This workflow is everything, says Angus McKenzie, sales director of Metropolitan Coffee. “It is easy to have a ‘trophy’ coffee bar which doesn’t work, and becomes a grudged cost rather than a benefit to the client – and the UK is littered with them!”

And so the general catering trade belief is that in-house cafes should be designed by coffee people, not by architects.

“The reason,” remarks Paul Thacker, head of Turnkey Design, “is because we’ve seen many more mistakes in café design than you have!”

The practicalities can be unusual. Behind the counter, the creation of cappuccino at high speed depends on the precise placing of some obscure pieces of kit, understood only by skilled coffee-makers, or baristas. An often-overlooked element is waste disposal – the role of the ‘knock-out box’, and the disposal of 7gm of spent coffee grounds for every cup, is only understood by baristi!

Out front, customer flow is the opposite of many catering design situations, explains Paul Meikle-Janney, MD of Coffee Community, a barista and award-winning café designer.

“Time after time we see the most beautiful coffee bars fail because of this. If people are waiting for their drink before they pay for it, you will get a bottleneck, and unhappy customers. The ideal espresso system is a linear system, which Starbucks got absolutely right – order, pay, and move to your drink, which is served at the end of the counter.”

It may also be a mistake to allow the client to help.  Tim Ripley, a consultant at the contract caterer Sodexho, is among those who warn that alarm bells sound whenever a client says they will save money by furnishing the customer seating area themselves

“Too often you’ll see them set up a workplace coffee bar in tables of four, with no twos, and no groups. It’s difficult to put this right when we’re stuck behind the counter!”

We put this to one office design consultancy who replied: ‘we don’t understand this’, thus proving his point – which is that the modern café is ‘the third place’, the meeting of workspace and relaxing space, and needs very creative understanding.

Arguments rage over how the ‘third place’ is achieved. One school of thought holds that circular tables are out, because they cannot be pulled together for meetings, and another side argues that large circular tables allow for six to meet together in equality. One opinion holds that every café table must now have a power socket and internet connection, and the other side says that the internet-café style is an abomination.

“If you allow for between 5-8 per cent of the building population being able to sit at once, that’s a good start,” says Angus McKenzie at Metropolitan. “Then assume that every customer will have either an A4 notepad or a computer, which dictates both your table space, and your table height.”

In recent years, there was a massive coffee-bar trend towards sofas. Is this practical in the corporate building?  No, says the coffee trade – this was a deliberate illusion that you could dwindle the afternoon away on that sofa, when the real aim was to turn customers round fast.

However, the sofa has highlighted the other illusion, by which most designers turn straight to steel and wipe-down materials for cafes.

“Those who take the risk of fabric benefit from the homely feel – it can change the entire mood of a cafe,” says Paul Meikle-Janney. “Starbucks were a leader in the ‘third place’ because they dared to use fabric, and they did it very well.

“Starbucks also play with ceiling heights and flooring very well. The average Starbucks has the ceiling low over the bar to make it cosy, and put a carpeted area slightly up some steps, and therefore the ceiling is lower, and this becomes the ‘snug’ for meetings.“

So should the entire design be handed over to a high-street coffee brand? Only if you want them to take the risk, say cynics. Some caterers claim that a branded coffee site performs 50 per higher than an unbranded site, but Artizian warns that some brands give very little in return for the loyalty-and-royalty payment.  And yet the Caffe Nero chain predicts that within five years, nine corporate coffee bars in ten will display one of the top three high-street brands.

There are design innovations which the café trade saw before anyone else. Lloyd Keisner of Tabletalk has created the business of putting advertisers’ messages on tabletops – it is in coffee shops, 85 universities, and moving into corporate cafes as a way of getting internal company messages across to a workforce, at a time when employees are in a relaxed state of mind, and likely to stay for fifteen minutes.

(Meikle-Janney at Coffee Community has tested another way. “It’s a poser rail in front of a bar with a layer of glass floated an inch or so above the counter. Magazines, papers and corporate messages are slotted under the glass – you read while standing your mug on the glass.”)

And the corporate café has cropped up to use the most unlikely spaces creatively. Claremont Design, working with architects Barber Casanovas Ruffles, extended the old Cambridge Water building by wrapping a glass conservatory around the outside – it became a successful long and narrow café space.

Not an isolated example but illustration of a new trend in positioning corporate café areas, says Chris Piper at Artizian:

“A deliberate trend is for client-facing companies to use their coffee-house as an area to do business in, right at the front of their atrium, before reception. The major advantage of this is that you do not now have to register all your visitors through security.

“The second advantage is that your visitor usually buys their coffee themselves, while they’re waiting for you!”

Contact details:

Artizian  0870 2000 442

Metropolitan  0208 743 8959

Claremont Interiors   01925 284000

Caffé Nero 020 7520 5150

Bite Catering 0208 453 9894

Turnkey Design  01285 720848

Nexus Interiors  0115 9463222

Coffee Community  01484 340033

TableTalk Media  020 7495 3450

Soexho 020 7535 7400