2025 Year in Review: Best of ‘Design Details’

In 2025, some of the most memorable coffee-centered design projects were clearly built around the feelings designers wanted to inspire among guests — comfort and belonging, wonder and spectacle, clarity and calm.

Across cafes and packaging, the work often hinged on how to communicate identity quickly, whether that meant translating a landscape into a visual language, carving out softness inside hard urban shells or leaning into playful storytelling.

As we continue our year in review, here is a look back at some standout design work, as featured in our ongoing Design Details series.

Daily Coffee News’ 2025 Year in Review is our annual look back at the people, places and ideas that shaped coffee this year. Read the full series.

Places

Design Details: Drinking Espresso With Venetian Lagoon Water

Coffee lovers seeking a literal flavor of Venice, Italy, can now drink espresso with water drawn from the Venetian Lagoon. Part espresso bar, part laboratory and part art installation, the Canal Café in the Arsenale area of the lagoon is part of the Italian city’s Biennale Architettura, the every-other-year architectural exhibition that runs from May through November. It involves a sytem of tanks and filters connecting the lagoon to a mobile espresso station…

Design Details: A Soaring Glass Dragon at The Duo in Queens

A day-to-night cafe and bar on Main Street in Queens, New York, called The Duo features a dramatic floating, twisting glass sculpture that captivates guests and reflects light differently throughout the day. Spanning just over 1,070 square feet, the cafe in Flushing has 30-foot ceilings. The New York-based hospitality design-build firm Design Next Agency originally proposed an upper level for additional seating, yet when the landlord declined, the designers looked upward to a canvas…

Design Details: Kafeterija as a Workshop in Belgrade

Prior to their work designing a location of Kafeterija, a well-known coffee chain in Serbia, the team at KIDZ Studio often used a Kafeterija location as an alternate office, finding the setting cozy and creatively inspiring. “The collaboration between KIDZ and the Kafeterija began with the question, ‘Can we work not only in the Kafeterija but also together with it?’” the Belgrade-based design firm recently told DCN

Design Details: Phases of the Sun at Bonne Bouche in Ukraine

On the ground floor of a post-Soviet residential block, the cafe Bonne Bouche opens up to the street with wide glazing, summer terraces and a colorful pastry program. The 200-square-meter (about 2,150 square feet) café brings a bright, sunlit front hall together with a softly lit inner room, wrapping both in rounded terrazzo surfaces and warm yellow upholstery

Design Details: Warmth of Wood at Space Timefill Cafe in South Korea

In South Korea, Space Timefill is a nearly 1,800-square-foot cafe inside an aging residential complex in Cheongju. The age of the building and its interior materials presented a unique set of challenges for the design studio SAISA, which sought to remove boundaries between the outside and the inside while transforming the space into a welcoming and modernized coffee shop

Design Details: Fungus-Derived Materials at Broche in Oxford, England

Broche Coffee is a tiny coffee shop in the heart of Oxford, England’s Jericho neighborhood, serving fresh baked goods and high-quality specialty coffee. The shop’s small size and the protected historical architecture status of the neighborhood presented interesting challenges to the architecture and design studio NAAW. The firm sought to “revitalize and make this inconspicuous corner attractive and comfortable without resorting to drastic measures and seamlessly blending it into its surroundings,” according to a project description shared with DCN

Design Details: Inside the Box at Klim Coffee in Victoria, Australia

In a new boutique business development in the bustling southeastern suburb of Mount Waverley, Victoria (Australia), is the flagship roastery cafe of Klim Coffee Roasting Co. Designed by the firm SuiL, following the client’s vision of a distinctive cafe within a business hub that shares the entire coffee-making process, the shop features a distinct “grid” and “box” design language, reinforcing the concept of craftsmanship