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From the inside, the 45 degree fins facilitate an elegant display of sunlight. “We’re facing west, but because there is a tall building across the street, we’re never going to get direct sunlight into the building,” Shively says.“The best we can do is get sun from the South, and so those fins, although they don't necessarily bounce the light into the building, they themselves glow in the afternoon as the sun comes around that way. It’s a really interesting sculptural thing to appreciate from inside the space.”

“Clients come in, and we make them coffee,” Shivley explains. “We use it as an opportunity to slow the pace, to chit-chat and catch up on how their day has been. It takes the formality out of meetings, to make it really social.” Instead of a stuffy atmosphere, “we're just in a coffee shop catching up,” he says.

Custom glass and iron doors, fabricated locally, section off a conference room in the cafe. “It was designed to be something that could be open to the public, but it’s wonderful that it’s not,” Mike says. “I get my own little toy coffee shop to play with.”

The café’s polished concrete floors are ground down to “expose some of the aggregate,” Mike says. Vintage leather chairs balance a custom banquette, upholstered in a forest-green wool felt by Kravet.