Monday Morning’s Chai at a Beautiful Bookstore Cafe

Starting Monday morning in a cafe like this would be an absolutely perfect way to start the day (and the week).

Via inhabitat

Manhattan’s McNally Jackson Books has incorporated an incredible array of bound book decor in their recently renovated cafe. The independent bookseller combined forces with Front Studio to renovate the bookstore’s existing café into a “place evocative of literature.” The collaboration establishes a new identity which celebrates intuitive connections between programmatic functions and acts of reading.

The café is fairly small but provides enough space for four distinct seating areas and an ordering station. Above the center seating area are a series of randomly placed light fixtures interlaced with a sporadic placement of similar extending cords but with no lamps. Each fixture and cord penetrates one used book each and creates an illusion “as if a pile of books had been thrown into the sky and frozen.”

The curved wall behind the bench seating is textured in a wall-covering made solely from open-spine books. At first glance, one would believe there were no tables in this area, but snapped to the papered wall are hinged wooden pull-down folding surfaces. Resembling antique schoolhouse writing desks, these tables are designed to project the form of a folded book when closed.

Above the ordering station is the menu filled with food-related quotes and another series of the same light fixtures — in this instance each fixture holds a large stack of different editions of the same book.

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