How We Lost "Javacore," and the Communal Coffee Shop With It
The now nostalgic-feeling, homey aesthetic of early ’90s and 2000s cafes was replaced by a look that’s intentionally less welcoming.
It’s 1998 and you walk into your favorite local coffee shop. It’s filled with worn-in leather couches and velvet armchairs you might find in a friend’s living room; the lights are low and warm, and local art hangs on the walls. Mazzy Star and Alanis Morissette waft from the speakers. You order from a hand-drawn chalkboard menu, and receive your coffee in a colorful, giant ceramic mug. Think: Friends’ Central Perk, the quintessential coffee shop depiction of the era.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, cafes were built for socializing. Many were open until 6 p.m., if not later, and hosted open mic nights, poetry slams, and music performances. They were designed to feel welcoming and encourage patrons to stay a while. Trend forecaster Alexa Penn fondly reminisces about these coffee shops from her childhood and teen years, and refers to their homey, familiar aesthetic as "javacore." Today, this aesthetic has been replaced by something entirely different.
Over the past 15 years, coffee shops have become more sterile and minimalist—chairs are often uncomfortable, tables are tiny, and walls are bare. "It’s taken modernity too far," Penn says. "It’s too crisp and white." Minimalism within a coffee shop often takes one of two forms. Some lead with millennial pink and a stereotypically feminine look: brass accents on white marble tables, pastel everything, maybe a rose petal–decorated glazed doughnut in the pastry case. (Writer Molly Fischer’s 2020 article for The Cut, "The Tyranny of Terrazzo: Will the Millennial Aesthetic Ever End?" paints the picture perfectly.) Others fit a more stereotypically masculine aesthetic; black tables, dark wood or metal furniture, maybe a taxidermied deer head on the wall. They each have at least a plant or two, a peg letter board menu, (black with white letters), and very little else.
This shift in aesthetics represents a shift in purpose: many cafes are no longer physically set up to encourage conversation or getting too comfy. I talked to one coffee shop employee in Portland, Oregon, who said her former employer specifically purchased uncomfortable chairs, hoping to discourage customers from staying too long. They’d find stools without backs, or chairs with especially small seats. More and more cafes are prioritizing to-go orders, and some close as early as 2 p.m. In coffee shops where there is ample seating, patrons are typically alone, and on laptops. Rather than setting up chairs and couches to face one another, many coffee shops place them in rows, sometimes complete with outlets (if you’re lucky). They feel closer to a WeWork office than a hub for conversation.
Aesthetic and design pendulum swings are inevitable. Evan Collins, cofounder of Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute, coined the term "global village coffeehouse" (GVC) in 2018 to describe a related ’90s aesthetic era. Design shifted toward earthiness, warmth—a homey look—and away from the sleek, glamorous, neon ’80s style of excess. The "GVC" aesthetic involved hand-drawn motifs like "aroma swirls" on to-go coffee cups, along with culturally appropriative "tribal" graphics and vaguely African masks hung on the walls. "Javacore" feels like "GVC" meets "shabby chic," which Collins says includes, "faux-worn furniture, brushed paint on a dresser, French country vibes, lots of flowers…found furniture, a thrift shop aesthetic." The trend analyst attributes the shift away from "javacore," in part, to Starbucks and other corporate chains that copied and widely popularized the style to the extent that it lost its original charm and felt disingenuous and pandering. In an effort to distinguish themselves, independent coffee shops rejected burlap coffee sacks and aroma swirls, and moved in the opposite direction, toward minimalism.
Collins also attributes the shift to economic necessity: After the 2008 recession, business owners began simplifying the design of their shops, optioning to order stools and tables online in bulk from Ikea or Amazon, rather than taking the time to pick out vintage or thrifted mismatched chairs, mugs, and decor. Coffee shops went for the easiest and most affordable option—white walls, a few plants, and maybe a But first, Coffee neon sign.
In a 2016 essay for The Verge, writer Kyle Chayka coined the term "AirSpace" to describe a "globalized sameness" evidenced by modern design tropes like raw wood, exposed brick, and hanging Edison bulbs in cafes, and the increasingly formulaic setup of Airbnbs and hotels. "It’s not that these generic cafes are part of global chains like Starbucks or Costa Coffee, with designs that spring from the same corporate cookie cutter," Chayka writes. "Rather, they have all independently decided to adopt the same faux-artisanal aesthetic." This, he says, allows for the "digital nomads" of the world to find comfort and most importantly productivity in any cafe anywhere they travel.
In order to keep a coffee shop afloat in a wildly different economy than the ’90s and 2000s, today’s owners have to encourage quick customer turnover. Paying higher rent, providing decent wages for workers, and sourcing sustainably grown coffee means the era of buying a $2 cup with unlimited free refills and lingering on a comfortable sofa for hours is behind us. Blank Street Coffee, which opened over forty locations in New York City alone within the last few years, focuses on customer turnover: maximizing the earning power of every square foot of rental space. In a 2022 interview with the New York Times, one of Blank Street’s founders, Issam Freiha, said, "We don’t need to be the most amazing cup of coffee you’ve ever had. We want to be the really good cup of coffee that you drink twice a day, every day." The article states that the nascent coffee shop chain doesn’t yearn to be the place you spend time with friends, or where you work at your laptop. Art history writer and TikToker Isabella Segalovich, who has posted multiple videos analyses of the shift in coffee shop aesthetics, feels Blank Street embodies "the idea of not really being tied to a certain place or a certain community, but instead being blank." The loss of the cozy coffee shop means the loss of a crucial third place in American culture; Segalovich describes the gravity of this loss in a dedicated TikTok series.
Although those interviewed for this article, and many across the internet, have a nostalgic fondness for cafes circa 1998, it’s possible that cozy, communal coffee shops went out of style due, in part, to less interest from customers. Many Americans do prioritize speed and efficiency over, well, everything. Coffee culture in other countries, particularly throughout Europe, traditionally involves time spent relaxing and socializing at cafes, while Americans tend to view coffee as a part of their commute, or something to aid their work day. There’s also been a larger shift toward people making their coffee at home, both for hobbyists and for those eager to save money. Pinterest listed "cafecore" (i.e. at-home coffee stations, comparable to bar cart setups) as one of its 2024 trend predictions.
"The extra effort to make a cafe into a warm, inviting space where people want to linger and really enjoy being with each other—it just isn’t considered as necessary, cause you don’t have people chatting with each other as much," says Collins. "No one’s coming in to read their poetry like in the ’90s."
Top photo by Doug Menuez/Getty Images
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