For the coffee-lover, nothing quite compares to heading down to the local hipster café, ordering your favorite coffee and basking in the bustle and chatter of life at its most vibrant. Unfortunately, the costs incurred by a habit of frequenting a café can quickly mount. But what if someone told you that you could achieve the same buzz without even leaving the house? If the description above sounds like you, the following list of easy tips on how to transform your own kitchen to give it that trendy café feel should be of interest.
1. Incorporate Blackboards
Almost every cool café today will have a number of blackboards fitted around the bar area to announce the menu and the day’s specials. Make your kitchen-café look authentic by adding blackboards to the doors of the kitchen cabinets or the breakfast bar. You can even use them to invent your own coffee creations or keep track of what you plan to eat on any given week.
2. Base Your Décor on Bare Brick and Wood
The hippest and most stylish cafes make extensive use of designs which feature a liberal use of brick and wood. Do not be afraid to take back the plaster from your walls and clean up the brickwork below that is waiting for a chance to shine. Rooms with exposed wooden roof beams are perfect, but if your kitchen does not possess them, choose pine or another type of finished wood for your tables and chairs to make up for it.
3. Buy a Top-Quality Retro Espresso Machine
The most important fitting of any good café is obviously the espresso machine. Make sure to splash out on a machine that both satisfies your cravings for great coffee and looks the part. There are some fantastic retro-looking espresso machines on the market today, and most of them will not break the bank either.
4. Install a Stylish Bar
A trend which has really taken off in recent years in coffee shops is the use of bar seating. An efficient way of conserving space as well as the perfect place to catch up on the news in the morning paper, bar seating will really provide that in-shop café feel to any kitchen.
5. Accessories
The finishing touch to your project should be to fill a number of glass-fronted cabinets and shelves with the trappings a busy café. Place stainless steel containers filled with fresh coffee, large, heavy ceramic cups and saucers and tiered stands for desserts made from metal in the storage spaces and on the surfaces. Decorate the walls with quirky modern art or images of sports stars of the past to trick yourself that you are in your favorite café.
A coffee habit can get expensive, especially if you have a penchant visiting trendy cafes. Who knows? Perhaps the cost of transforming your own kitchen into a working replica of a café with eventually end up saving you money after all!