Australians Are Designing Beautiful Cafés, and Here Are Some of the Best

Architect-submitted photos for the Eat Drink Design Awards. For more on the 2015 Best Café Design winners, visit www.eatdrinkdesign.com

Much as it represents the vanguard in coffee roasting, preparation and service, Australia also presents some of the world’s most beautiful physical spaces in which to sip caffeinated drinks. Since 2012, Australia’s Eat Drink Design Awards — organized by magazine publisher AGM Publishing and endorsed by the Australian Institute of Architects and the Design Institute of Australia — have been celebrating these spaces and the people who give them life.

While the awards program covers numerous categories in food-centric hospitality, the café category holds its own, displaying work that is ingeniously reflecting and driving new trends in interior architecture, design and physical branding.

Two Australian cafés took the top honor in this year’s awards, announced today: Abbots and Kinney, the new pastry and coffee shop from Australian barista competitor and 2010 Australian Cup Tasters Champion Jonny Pisanelli; and The Kettle Black, a breakfast-centric South Melbourne multiroaster café from six owners who come from Melbourne’s Two Birds One Stone and Top Paddock.

Studio-gram led the design of Abbots and Kinney, which the awards committee described as “a poster child for excellence in craftsmanship,” including a dominantly expressed frame timber wall.

Studio You Me was the lead design firm behind The Kettle Black, which the awards committee characterized as “at the apotheosis of cafe design right now — light, airy, spacious, where everything is carefully considered yet it all comes across as insouciant in the extreme.”

For more on these projects and a host of others that were in close consideration for top honors, see the Eat Drink Awards café design category.