Brooklyn Museum Café

The Brooklyn stoop is a place where everyone is welcome—a perch to rest, gather, and commune. These same principles drove our reimagining of the café at the nearly 200-year-old Brooklyn Museum, an institution with access, art, and expression at the center of its mission. Located before the building’s security threshold, the publicly accessible café serves a diverse array of users seeking space for eating, sitting, working, and meeting. Without touching the building’s existing footprint—a room with no right angles—we devised a flexible interior scheme with lightweight screen dividers breaking up the large space into smaller pockets. Colorful, serpentining “rivers” of tables and “islands” of soft seating support a variety of postures while embodying a sense of playfulness, and our custom wedge tables adapt existing museum ottomans into conjoining, modular elements. One-of-a-kind stools by Brooklyn-adjacent artists further engage with the museum’s identity and mission, bringing culture and community literally to the table.