Design the Teeny Cafe Kitchen
Hello KF, I wonder if we’d like to noodle on a small commercial kitchen design?
Below is a to-scale CAD model of the first floor of the 1908 Portland four-square I have bought. “Four-square” is a type of house with two levels; the lower being divided into four rooms (foyer, living, dining, kitchen) and the upper being usually four bedrooms and a bathroom. It was a common style here in the early 1900s. My own house is a four-square.
This building started life as a single-family house on a corner lot fronting a main street with a streetcar line, two floors of about 920 sf each, a basement plus small basement garage, and an attic. That made it a pretty substantial house for the time.
Sometime between the world wars it was converted to “flats and a store”, then during WW2 the store was converted to a third flat to make a triplex. It was later owned by, coincidentally, the Portland “Four-Square Church”, who used it as a rooming house for youths in their stone mason program. The pastor lived in the small house next door, which still has crosses under the gable eaves, and the church also owned the third house on the adjacent corner. In the 1980s, all three houses were bought by a young contractor, who rented out the triplex and the other two houses. When I moved to the neighborhood twenty years ago, the first floor was a funky barbershop-bar.
Fast forward to April 2025, when I walked by - I live three blocks away - I noticed the For Sale sign, and learned the house was zoned commercial. Interesting. A long process ensued and we closed escrow this week.
I plan to convert the house from residential to commercial use, use the second floor as my office, and my daughter will open a cafe-bookshop in the first floor, and possibly expand to the basement if the book business merits.
In the model below, the skinny purple walls are non-load-bearing divider walls installed in the between-war years to separate the original foyer into entrances for the second floor unit and the first floor unit. Those can be easily removed. The other walls can be modified, maybe reduced to a couple columns and a header, but can't easily be entirely removed. One of the large windows may be converted to French doors to the porch. The porch is covered, and may eventually be wholly/partly enclosed since we do have six months of foul weather a year.
The annotated floorplan shows the original room designations, and dimensions for the kitchen. The original kitchen was just 10' x 11'8". At some point, a bumpout was added that house the bathroom and "kitchen alcove"; that bumpout is single story with a roof directly above. The "kitchen storage" was a little deck, that was later enclosed. The existing kitchen is how you might picture a kitchen last remodeled in the 1940s or 50s. The solid mass in the top-right of the kitchen may possibly be removable. Half if it is a gas wall heater I will remove. I’m not sure what is in the other half, probably ducting for the long-gone oil furnace.
We have not figured out where the coffee counter will go. The back wall of the (former) dining room is where the barber chairs and sink were, so it has plumbing. The stairs, which will be to my office, may get modified to hug the exterior wall, so as to take up less space. Eventually the second floor may get its own entrance.
The cafe will start as a “coffee shop” with some baked goods, breakfast wraps, etc. More food will be added to be a ”cafe”, but it will never be a ”restaurant” with a full menu, cooks preparing dishes to order. and waitstaff. Seating capacity only about 15 inside with more on the porch. Daily menu will have about 6-10 items, prepared ahead for quick assembly and heating - for example a salade Nicoise, a Chef's salad, quiches and tartines, a few sandwiches, a couple soups, baked goods, etc. More vegetarian and vegan than meat-heavy. And, of course coffee, espresso, lattes, iced coffee, and so on.
The menu will be designed for the kitchen’s limitations. Cooking will be with ovens (speed, steam, etc) and a couple of induction hobs. If we do meat - say, confit de canard - it'll be mostly done sous vide with browning by oven or hob. But as I say, it will open as just a coffee shop.
My initial thoughts are that one or two countertop half-size ovens and two induction hobs would go in the "kitchen alcove" where a hood can vent directly through the bump-out roof. Storage, refrigerator/freezer, mop sink in the "kitchen storage" space. Local code does not require a three basin sink if we have a dishwasher, and does not require a vent hood if the dishwasher is undercounter, so the dishpit can be a two basin or smaller three basin sink with undercounter dishwasher, under-sink grease trap, and shelves for ware above. Code does require mop sink and handwashing sink, floor drains, washable surfaces, etc.
The bathroom entrance can be modified - moving the bathroom is maybe possible, but expensive. Given the small occupancy, only one bathroom is required. It is not large enough to be fully ADA compliant but I’ll do my best. A wheelchair lift to porch will eat up most of the ADA budget.
Not gotten much farther in thinking than that.
Here is the existing kitchen. Has a nice old Wedgewood range, which sadly I’ll get rid of. The kitchen alcove and kitchen storage are both shown. Everything you see will be removed and gutted.
The porch is possibly my favorite part of the house. A popular pub is across the street, more pubs and restaurants down the block. That is an active main street, and the cross street is a bike route, so plenty of foot traffic.
Cosmetics need work, bones and systems are good.
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Thanks! I love finding out the history of odl buildings. It is usually possible to find old photos, copies of old documents, learn who lived there and what they did, etc. People like seeing that stuff too.
That cafe in your town looks really nice. Their space looks larger than ours, so we really need to make the most use of the porch - hence the idea to semi-enclose that porch so it is usable for more of the year.
For the kitchen, I was noodling something like this. The sketch shows just the kitchen area.
Cut a passthrough to "dining room" at top (of image), have sandwich and salad prep there. Put ovens and induction hobs in the kitchen alcove to left, with hood above if needed. Dishpit on the right, with clean dish storage on shelves immediately above. A general purpose prep table at the bottom with storage above and storage or refrigeration undercounter. Hoping I can squeeze a mop sink into the storage room where the refrigerator, freezer, dry storage will be. If the "mystery space" can be cleared out, that would be helpful. I need to lay things out with blue tape, then mock up with cardboard boxes. The good thing is that not much will be "built in", so things can be changed around as needed.
There are some reasons to open with as little equipment as possible and add most of the equipment after the space is in service. Tax reasons . . . think difference between amortizing startup costs over 15 years vs 100% bonus depreciation. So we might be pretty minimalist initially, while putting a whole bunch of not-currently-needed electric circuits and plumbing. For example, water and drain in the alcove for possible future steam oven. When walls and floor are open is the best time to add all that stuff.
EDIT: DD and I taped out the kitchen floor. The plan shown above seems broadly workable. I’ll start demo’ing the cabinetry and we will see how things develop.
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Sigh, playing with CAD is one thing, actually standing in the space is another, we are going to have to get big cardboard boxes and mock everything up. Is there room to open the oven door and pull out a hot sheet pan, will a sink that fits there have basins big enough for a 20 qt mixer bowl, how skinny do you have to be to squeeze past the barista, where does the $!&#%?>£ mop sink go.
First you have to rip everything out so that the mocking up can be done.
Then rip it out more so that your $200/hr electrician and plumber will be able to get in and out in minimum time. That will all be down to studs and joists.DD is supremely confident that she can make any kitchen work. Inspiration from tiny kitchen establishments like those profiled here
I, the beady-eyed worst-caser, am thinking that if her cafe doesn’t work, I’ll have to rent the space out to someone who may not be as optimistically flexible. So it has to be a fairly complete if small kitchen, or at least have the infrastructure in place.
The stair plans have changed. Turns out my original plan requires one’s upper body to pass ghost-like through part of the second floor. Oops. Not being dead yet, that won’t work. So I’m restoring the original straight run which will allow an 8’ coffee bar plus a bit more.
Like this but with an additional counter closing off access to back of house
John LiuOriginal Author