COFFEE AND BOOKS: AN ICONIC MATCH

WORDS BY SARAH GORY

In an unassuming building on the edge of Melbourne’s CBD, Everyday Coffee’s latest venture pairs good books and great coffee in a pared-down, utilitarian and inviting space.

In a kind of Melbourne inner north stereotype, at least once a week, I cycle from my home in Collingwood to one of Everyday Coffee’s several establishments to drink a cup of small-batch, locally roasted black coffee and get some writing done. Co-founded by Mark Free and Aaron Maxwell, Everyday Coffee has various locations around Melbourne and yet no one space of theirs is quite the same. Their latest venture, in a former receiving dock in the heart of the university district of Carlton, conveniently happens to be downstairs from the designers that I regularly work with. Indeed, it came about as a collaborative coffee-cum-design-cum-book space that is innately Melbourne and distinctly universal. Books and coffee have a long history of interaction that goes beyond the image of the lone writer tapping away while downing cup after caffeinated cup. From the coffee houses of sixteenth-century Vienna to the streets of modern-day India, cafés are traditional meeting places where ideas are thrown around, poetry performed, collaborations dreamt up, and manifestos written. In Melbourne, a UNESCO City of Literature renowned worldwide for its coffee culture, there couldn’t be a more iconic pairing. What sets this iteration of Everyday Coffee apart from other bookstore-cafés, however, is its streamlined specificity and oh-so-Melbourne vibe—that the café seems tailor-made for its location, is no coincidence. When Mark Free and Aaron Maxwell approach a new venture, it begins as a blank slate. ‘Many things inform a new space,’ Free tells me, ‘the bones of the building, the neighbourhood, the perceived audience—the context informs the concept.’ In keeping with the industrial aesthetic of the building, the café itself is

‘Cafés are traditional meeting  places where ideas are thrown around, poetry performed, collaborations dreamt up, manifestos written.’

stark—plywood tables, a roller door kept open in the warmer months, whitewashed walls and a few plants soaking up the natural sunlight that streams through the windows behind the coffee machine. There’s a print workshop in a room at the back, and the collection of books for sale (and to peruse) comes from Thornbury-based small press Perimeter, whose titles range from the hyper-local to the obscure, all art- and design-oriented, all beautiful to look at, to touch and to read. In fact, it’s probably not quite correct to call this a mere bookstore-café. Rather, the entire enterprise is a creative collaboration that came about serendipitously. Everyday Coffee’s first café was a shopfront on Johnston Street in Collingwood, just two doors up from design studio Public Office and independent graphic designers Ziga Testen and Stuart Geddes. ‘One day I bumped into Ziga,’ says Free, ‘and the conversation started about this space.’ Now Public Office runs the design studio and library above the café on Queensberry Street, and both Ziga and Stuart have desks upstairs too. The collaborative aspect of the enterprise is not incidental either; rather, it is central to its viability. ‘We knew there was a good chance that it wasn’t going to make a lot of money,’ Free explains, ‘so it needed to at least be an interesting project.’ Resources are shared, and everything in the space is locally made and multipurpose. As Free notes, ‘books are not only sold in the space but produced in the studios above and the print shop behind.’ There is little in the way of built-in furniture, and from the outset, the space was designed with a certain fluidity, able to encompass various uses; ‘the tables, furniture and layout allow for talks and workshops or late night collating sessions.’ These various interests are evident in the details—the care put into the curation of the book collection (many designed by Testen and Geddes themselves), the large shared table that takes up the bulk of the floor space, the rough-and-ready interior, the sense of an embedded locality that makes Everyday Coffee a genuinely welcoming space. And this is just the beginning. ‘There may be some new ventures on the horizon, but nothing I can speak about just yet,’ laughs Free. We’ll drink to that!

Everyday Coffee
225 Queensberry Street, Carlton Monday to Friday, 7.30 am to 4 pm