Espresso obsesso

Larry’s connection with coffee is very personal in this recent article he describes obsessions. “I have a photo somewhere, from the mid-1980s, of my young wife to be sitting in Kleines Café in Vienna next to the front door with black coffee and a book, a cigarette burning in the ashtray, outside a wintery grey. My fascination with coffee began a few years before the photo with a book on Viennese coffee houses. That book began a journey that has no destination, just a journey.

Over the decades we have designed dozens of espresso bars, cafes, torrefaziones and even a plantation. I drank short blacks at every opportunity and made pilgrimages to bar coluzzi in Sydney and Pellegrini’s in Melbourne to find better coffee experiences before designing my 1^st bar bar merlo in 1992. I recently sought out a coffee house in Padang, West Sumatra to have the local Civet Coffee. I was only mildly disappointed to find they had run out as they had plenty of other local small batch beans to try.

I have only just realised the extent of my obsessions when someone mentions that I hadn’t visited many vineyards and wineries in Australia. When I rattled of a dozen ranging from Tamar to Derwent, Barossa, Ad Hills, Mornington, King Valley, Heathcote, Hunter, Orange. Add this to slavishly following wine routes in Burgundy, Bordeaux, Rhone, Champagne & Alsace you start to wonder about the nature of obsession.

In my work I am naturally curious, I enjoy the research as much as the design and construction. My real long term obsession is “doing things better”. I recently read that spending 10000 hours driving won’t make you a formula 1 star, we probably all spend that long driving. However, spending 10000 pushing to improve might get you on the starting grid.

Our work over the last 25 years for merlo coffee has always been about delivering a better experience than the price of a cup of coffee would normally afford you. Each new job needs to improve on the last".