In Darlinghurst, Mecca Coffee‘s third Sydney café doesn’t just reference underground architecture, it is one, extending below Oxford Street level behind a modest entrance on Foley Street. Designed by Sydney-based studio Killing Matt Woods to mark the specialty coffee roaster’s 20th year, the subterranean site takes its cue from the dugout homes of Coober Pedy, carved directly into the earth to escape the desert heat. Few Sydney cafés have gone underground before; fewer still have built an entire material language around the fact.
Twenty years after introducing specialty coffee to Sydneysiders from a single café on King Street, Mecca Coffee has grown into a business spanning sourcing at origin, roasting, wholesale, and retail — and Foley Street becomes its third café in the city, joining locations in Alexandria and Paddington within Darlinghurst’s new Oxford & Foley precinct.
For founder Paul Geshos, the new site was never about growth for its own sake, but a deepening of roots in the inner-city neighbourhoods where Mecca Coffee has always operated. That intent shaped the brief to Killing Matt Woods, whose recent Sydney hospitality projects include Grandfather’s, The Caterpillar Club, and Happy Shop.
Embracing the site’s cave-like qualities meant treating the underground dugout homes of Coober Pedy as a direct reference point, and letting the building’s own history speak through its materials: convict-era bricks, swirled Sydney sandstone, and colonial-era Brickfield Hill pottery dating to 1820 all support a space designed to feel dug out rather than fitted out. It’s a design methodology shared by Uchronia’s Café Shin Marais in Paris, where the studio embedded the material memory of two earlier locations into a single new room — at Foley Street, the memory being embedded is the building’s own convict-era and colonial history rather than a brand’s.
At the centre of operations sits a monolithic, raw-cut Pilbara red marble counter, quarried from one of the world’s oldest geological landscapes in Western Australia. It anchors the room the way the site’s underground character is meant to be felt everywhere else, in weight and texture rather than decoration — the same instinct Studio Wok used at Pan Deli in Milan, where a central counter was designed as the “protagonist” of a neighbourhood gathering space.
Custom blackbutt joinery and walls incorporating blackbutt shavings sit against textured ceilings and natural stone floors, while a moon-like dome light, designed by Matt Woods and crafted by Ian Tran at Domus Vim, hangs as the room’s one deliberately soft, luminous counterpoint to all that stone and timber.
“The overarching concept was to embrace the space’s inherent character, turning its greatest constraint — its cave-like proportions — into its greatest asset,” says Matt Woods. “The primary design reference was the underground dugout spaces of Coober Pedy, carved directly into the sandstone landscape. Their simple forms, honest use of materials and connection to the earth inspired a space that feels part of the building rather than applied to it,” he says.
The layout holds two paces at once: a serving window and standing bar for a quick espresso on the way past, and indoor and outdoor seating for anyone staying long enough to work through a filter and a book. Drinks run from espresso pulled on a La Marzocco Strada X through to batch brews, pour overs, and a spiced cold brew with cold foam, using coffees sourced directly by Mecca Coffee Foley Street‘s parent roastery in Alexandria, with pastries delivered daily from Iggy’s in Bronte.
“If we get the hospitality right, the coffee becomes the reason people walk in, and the room becomes the reason they come back,” says Geshos. “A café only gets a small window of someone’s day, but what happens in that moment matters.” At Foley Street, that window opens below street level, in a room built to feel like it was always there.
Mecca Coffee Foley Street by Killing Matt Woods | Location: Foley Street, at the rear of 90 Oxford Street, Darlinghurst, Sydney, Australia — Year: 2026 — Key materials: convict-era bricks, Sydney sandstone, colonial-era Brickfield Hill pottery, Pilbara red marble counter, blackbutt joinery, moon-like dome light