London Design Week Has A Virtual Museum Café Reigniting The Coffee Experience
Image via Giles Miller Studio
Virtual reality (VR) spaces are becoming more common now, having exploded in popularity as an alternative to going out to spaces like events and art galleries thanks to COVID-19 lockdowns across the globe.
However, there aren’t many VR spaces that are centered around an experience that many miss: going to a café. Specifically, sitting down at a museum café after wandering the exhibitions.
As part of London Design Week 2021, architecture and design firm Giles Miller Studio has collaborated with cult favorite coffee brand Grind to create a virtual coffee experience in a virtual gallery. Besides this café, there are also galleries with Giles Miller’s work on display for visitors’ perusal.
Image via Giles Miller Studio
The studio explains to Wallpaper that the coffee bar isn’t supposed to recreate the conventional “warm and crowded space to meet, work and relax” experience of going to a café. Instead, it aims to offer visitors from around the globe the experience most of us already know but now in a new, digital format.
There isn’t the option to virtually buy a coffee then have it materialize in your hands, but the space itself is designed not unlike an art piece. The project utilizes “eco tiles” which are made from the byproducts of processing coffee.
Image via Giles Miller Studio
It also includes Grind’s own coffee machine, entirely digital, available to prod and find out more about. And for coffee lovers, there’s also a competition to enter that could win you a machine of your own—in real life.
Image via Giles Miller Studio
Due to the pandemic, the coffee brand hasn’t been able to operate as normal and has lost a lot of business as a result. “We were faced with the challenge of bringing Grind to life in a way that was completely new to us,” it states, and recalls that it spent most of its time during lockdown “helping people make better, more sustainable coffee at home.”
Sustainability has taken a firm stance in this gallery, too, with one of the walls dedicated to displaying facts about the environmental detriments of single-use coffee pods.
Image via Giles Miller Studio
“We couldn’t wait to reopen and are so grateful to be welcoming people back into our cafés again now,” Grind continues. “We’re excited to find new ways to meet people—and bring them together for coffee—moving forward.”
The V-Gallery by Giles Miller Studio can be explored on its website, linked here.
[via Wallpaper, images via Giles Miller Studio]
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