In Montmartre, Mur Mur Architects craft a minimalist Paris café where stainless steel alcoves transform industrial heritage into sculptural intimacy.
Designed by Mur Mur Architects—helmed by Benoît Huen and Lucie Rosenblatt—the single-room space is a study in metallic warmth and spatial intimacy. With a palette restricted almost entirely to stainless steel, the café recalls industrial memory while reframing it in a context of urban repose. This is not a nostalgic tribute, but a reinvention—a contemporary refuge cast in reflective coolness.
The spatial choreography is dictated by a sequence of half-moon alcoves—bespoke seating niches bent into form by machines typically reserved for manufacturing grain silos. These rounded enclosures offer a sense of architectural embrace, both solitary and communal, enhanced by small matching tables that nestle into the curvature. Atop each niche, adjustable satellite-shaped discs reinterpret utilitarian lighting as personal ritual, allowing guests to tilt the ambiance to their liking. It's a subtle nod to the neon glow of old Parisian cafés, filtered here through a futuristic lens.
Materiality does not stop at the steel. Full-height mirrored pillars punctuate the room, refracting and multiplying the interiors in a kind of geometric mise en abyme. The effect is less about opulence and more about perceptual elasticity; the space seems to stretch and fold back on itself, like a Möbius strip in silver. At the front, a crescent-shaped counter curves against the bay windows, offering transparency to the street while tucking the clientele into the deeper privacy of the rear alcoves. It's a spatial choreography of exposure and seclusion, openness and retreat.
By leaving the storefront in quiet anonymity, Mur Mur Architects have allowed the interior to become a secret to be discovered—a luminous core concealed within a neutral shell. In a city often tethered to its aesthetic past, Simple Coffee proposes a different mode of elegance: one that merges industrial rigor with sculptural calm, creating a spatial typology that feels both forward-looking and innately human.
