Every morning, before anything else happens, most people do the same small thing: they make coffee. It’s so automatic we rarely call it what it is— a ritual. A repeated act that marks a threshold between sleep and the day ahead. I wanted to design a building that celebrated that ritual in a fun and thoughtful way.
Most coffee shops are designed for speed pull in, grab a cup, leave. While you can still do that— I wanted Dodo to slow that down, just slightly. So instead of walking straight to a counter, you move through a sequence: an archway, a courtyard, a shift in light. It’s a small procession— nothing dramatic, but enough that by the time you reach the counter, you’ve arrived somewhere, rather than just stopped somewhere.
I wanted to make a place that honored the ritual.
That central chimney of the building is one of the first things you see. It anchors the roofline the way a steeple anchors a village church. Then the open ceiling in the porch brings in a shaft of light and lets you know you are somewhere special. In sacred architecture, light is often used to mark a moment— a shift from outside to inside, from ordinary to something else. It creates a hint of that here, even in a building where people are just coming to get an espresso before work or an afternoon cold brew and a little break.
Thats not the only place the light comes in. The perforated stucco wall in the courtyard filters daylight into a scattered pattern on the ground, similar to the way tracery works in cathedrals— breaking light apart so it feels alive rather than flat. It’s a quiet detail, and it changes how the space feels at different times of day.
