Brunswick House coffee rooms

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There’s a place I want to tell you about. And because I’m leaving London, I can share this place with you because it was mine but now it can be yours.

Last May, I started to go to Brunswick House Coffee Rooms which were very close to our house in Vauxhall.

Over time, I’ve seen these coffee rooms grow from a very tiny, quiet, little risk-taking seed to something flourishing and very popular. When I first went, the big shop counter fridge didn’t work and had a large sheet over it, the baking tins had just arrived and I sat in odd corners of the room with ever changing tables and chairs, chandeliers, lights, cupboards and doors. It became a pattern of mine to go every weekend. I'm still a regular.


The coffee rooms are the old coach-house of Brunswick House and the reason the interior is ever changing is because it’s all for sale all of the time and belongs to Lassco’s which is (by the website’s definition) ‘England’s prime resource for architectural antiques, salvage and curios’. I’m not so sure about that but I do know the whole place has a rather extraordinary unique shabby/ grand feel to it and best of all in this whole grade II listed building built in1758, are the coffee rooms.

I think they got to know me before I got to know them.

I used to go to use the internet and leave immediately afterwards but time has altered this place into somewhere I regularly just go to be myself in. Maybe I read the paper, drink tea, meet Patti, use skype to call Hong Kong or eat Boston beans with bacon hock. I’ve undone jumpers, knitted new jumpers, met folks with interesting jobs, read entire books and written parts of this blog whilst spending hours in this place.

It is really a very special place.

People have written reviews about it but somehow I feel that it partly belongs to me as if only I discovered it before it became popular and fashionable to sit here. Along with its growing popularity, the menu has grown from strength to strength and although the food is good, it’s not the only or even main reason to come.

Anyone who enters feels the unique atmosphere - it permeates everything.

On the surface, fresh pastries, seven types of coffee, Boston bean stew, ice cream, grenola, teas or lemonade are all designed and made and consumed here. Because that is what happens, it’s a place of pure design around taste, and texture, and sounds and an experience.

And the icing on top of the cake is the cook and designer - where would a place be without a visionary leader? He cooks everything on the premises with the love and passion of an Isabelle Allende character but more than that, he built every detail, the décor, the feel of the polished cutlery, the cut of the glasses, the coffee machine, the natural characters of his staff, the light falling across the floor, the smile of a customer, the chair of a regular and I notice all of these small things and the murky water in the vase, the breeze moving the bunting and the baby called Herbert cradled by his mother.

But, he Owns it all.

This simple effortless pleasure that everyone feels when they are in this place - they don’t know it but he owns it.

And I wonder if no one, except me knows this fact.

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Photos

breakfast in the trees
Bloomsbury

150th Year at Battersea
we went for an afternoon out

Comments

[deleted_49612]

Congratulations, on your first Featured Blog. :)

[TraceyDoxey]

first
thanks, Mell. It's because of you, really