EBBA Architects builds Cup of Joy‘s Marylebone walls the way a mason might have built them a century ago — by hand, one stone at a time, then buries the labor under clay so nobody sees it happen. The London studio’s first UK outpost for the Istanbul café chain treats its 168-square-meter (1,808-square-foot) site not as a fit-out but as an act of material immersion, drawing on the deep walls and shaded courtyards of the brand’s home city rather than importing its visual motifs. The result reads less like a coffee shop that opened last month than one that has stood on the corner for years.
The concept began with materials, not floor plans. As the brand’s debut UK location, Cup of Joy asked EBBA to translate the character of Istanbul and the culture of drinking coffee there into a space that would still connect to the ethos of a design-led client — an ambition the studio pursued through Istanbul-inspired café design and a courtyard logic rather than literal ornament, aiming to translate a feeling of being somewhere else into the room itself.
Those walls are not applied finish but a constructed sequence of hand-placed stone walls: stones hand-selected and positioned by the studio directly on site, then drawn back into the render surface by the clay itself, a process that required extensive in-studio testing before it ever reached Marylebone. Clay was chosen specifically for its capacity to absorb and soften a room both acoustically and visually, doing quiet work that a harder finish couldn’t.
Large Portland stone slabs anchor the walls with a block base that breaks up into smaller pieces as it rises, a detail meant to translate Istanbul’s stone-wall texture into something that reads as accumulated rather than installed. The clay rendered over the stone gives the surfaces a monolithic quality — heavy, continuous, closer to enclosure than to decoration.
A continuous datum band runs around the interior, anchoring guests within the room and giving the heavy walls a legible order. Between the sculptural wall elements, carved timber nooks hold seating, benches, retail displays, and a water fountain — the thickness of the walls themselves becoming the opportunity to place moments to sit within them, rather than against them.
On the ground floor, a large oak bar cuts diagonally across the room, its angle echoed in the geometry of the surrounding custom EBBA-designed furniture — including the shared table and the high and low stools — to give the shifted floor plan a quiet internal coherence rather than a series of separate zones.
Overhead, a panelled ceiling of timber and opaque glass distributes light evenly across the space, avoiding the harsh directionality typical of hospitality lighting in favor of an ambient glow. Woodblock flooring runs across both levels, while a terracotta concrete stair with a matching steel structure marks the transition between them — the same material logic extended from wall to floor to stair.
Downstairs shifts register entirely: where the ground floor is sculptural and filled with angular geometry, the basement drops into lower furniture and soft curves, gathered beneath a circular oculus above an oak-panelled basement niche. Terracotta tones give way to a darker walnut, a tonal contrast the studio uses the way Killing Matt Woods used raw sandstone and convict-era brick at Mecca Coffee’s Foley Street café — letting a room’s material shift do the work of announcing a change in atmosphere without a single sign or partition.
Custom paper lanterns, designed in-house by EBBA and named Pulse, complete the lighting alongside wall lights from Danish brand Frandsen and chairs by Frama for this Cup of Joy café London debut. It’s a detail easy to miss on a first visit: the same hand that positioned every stone in the ground-floor walls also drew the lamp hanging above the stairwell, which is the kind of continuity that doesn’t announce itself so much as it quietly holds the whole room together.
Cup of Joy by EBBA Architects | Location: Marylebone, London, UK — Year: 2026 — Key materials: clay plaster, Portland stone, oak, terracotta concrete, opaque glass