Zatsepi Coffee Moscow

Zatsepi Coffee is a coffee shop in Moscow that we designed as a living room for the neighbourhood. It rests on the architectural modernism of the 1960s and 70s, though what we took from that school was not its styling but the way it was built: even light across the whole room, no corner reserved for the boss, glass instead of solid walls. In a room like that there are no bad seats. Which is exactly what a place needs when people come to sit rather than to grab and go. Everything else followed from what public life was made of back then: libraries, research institute halls, the space programme, vinyl.

We poured a seamless concrete floor and set a serpentine mosaic into it. Serpentine is a green stone with veining, and in Soviet public interiors it read as expensive (it was laid in metro stations and in institute lobbies). What we got is a cheap base with a costly inlay, and that, in essence, is the whole project. The mosaic sits where people settle in for a while. In the walkways and at the counter the floor stays smooth, so your feet register the pace before your head does. The stone also set the palette: pine green, with honey oak on the walls and furniture and brick terracotta on the tabletops. The counter is clad in polished granite. ...

The partitions are built from full-height glass block. It lets light through and keeps sightlines out: you can see that someone is behind it, but not who they are or what they are doing. A guest ends up among people without being examined by them. The glass block also shifts with the street outside - blue in the morning, orange by evening, grey in the rain - while the light in the ceiling boxes stays the same all day. We left the ceilings open and made no attempt to hide the services.

The zones in this coffee shop interior design are built around how long a visit lasts. At the counter there are high tables with amber acrylic chairs, the four-minute stop with a cup. The communal table under the pleated pendant is meant for laptops and meetings. Round tables stand along a burgundy theatre curtain that runs the full height of the wall. The curtain does a second job as the only large soft surface in the room, which is to say it takes the hum out of it. In the lounge by the window there are rounded armchairs and lacquered saucer tables, and next to them a rack of vinyl, a vintage radiogram and green bouclé armchairs on wooden legs, the same ones that used to furnish research institutes. Tucked away on its own is the Grandmaster's Corner: a black leather sofa, a rug, a chess set. A place to be alone without leaving the room.