We set out to make a city living room — a place where people meet to talk, sit, and unwind after a walk through the Gulbenkian gardens, a museum visit, an afternoon of shopping. The bar sits fully open toward the room, breaking the usual distance between guests and staff, the way it breaks down in a home: nobody hides the kitchen from the people they love.

For us, it matters that a space has humanity. Like a person, it should be self-ironic, and it should draw out emotion from each guest's own memory and experience. Café Flaneur is our interpretation of the modern bistro — built from references that are familiar on their own, but unexpected together.

Ticking fabrics and Basque stripe, prints once reserved for entirely utilitarian things — mattresses, kitchen towels, farmhouses — sit next to bright blue ceramic tile that calls up a resort pool somewhere else entirely. In the tiny bathroom, a vintage shell-shaped basin, inherited with the space, sits against plain stained plywood, and the whole room feels like a compartment on the Orient Express. We never learned who owned the space before us, so instead of guessing, we chose to interpret what they left.

Underneath the false ceilings we found the original plasterwork and cornices, buried and forgotten. We stripped the panels away and let the ceiling become one of the first things you notice in the room.

None of these references are meant to match. They're meant to be felt on a first visit and slowly decoded on every one after — which is what makes the space feel less designed and more lived-in, alive, like home.