Black Drop Coffee Shop in Kavala, Greece by Ark4LO Architecture.

In the centre of Kavala, a city located in the northern Greece, Black Drop, designed by Ark4LO Architecture, offers an alternative coffee break.

Black Drop is a coffee shop where coffee is treated more like an experience – an urban act of sorts. A stand built of mosaic becomes an interactive space for informing and exchanging views on the art of coffee. Materials such as copper, terrazzo, exposed concrete, old timber surfaces and rusted walls “capture the sense that you are a part of a laboratory where you can act and react,” explains the architect.

Α multi-level timber platform is positioned at the front of the store, facing the city’s ‘Kapnergaton’ square. Its geometry and placement dissolve the boundary with the exterior, transforming the coffee shop into an urban space for gathering. This emerging urbanity is complemented by a timber structure with references to the parametric design where the user can sit and enjoy the coffee in different ways.

Among the old walls, there are works of art embedded in the space, such as a portrait made of traditional tiles and a rhinoceros model analysed in triangles.

“Black Drop is a place where post-industrial contemporary urban aesthetics meet the ‘obsession’ of coffee lovers in a way that coffee experience becomes a social act,” explains the architect.

[Images courtesy of Ark4LO Architecture. Photography by Nikos Vavdinoudis & Christos Dimitriou.]