This Hong Kong coffee shop evokes a retro Milanese bar

Lucas Sam Si-long hasn’t always been a coffee drinker – let alone an aficionado. Involved in sponsorship sales and marketing for Spanish football club FC Barcelona, he took a serendipitous turn, career-wise, on a visit to Milan, Italy, where an encounter with Antonio Biscotti, founder of the Torrefazione Il Griso brand, caused an idea to brew.

“I fell in love with authentic Milanese coffee and the city’s coffee culture, and was inspired to bring the concept to Hong Kong,” says Sam. “However, I was hesitant to use Griso’s branding. I didn’t want to dilute Antonio’s established brand – or be tied to it.”

Instead, the budding entrepreneur opted for originality over emulation. He coined his own “Coffeelin” concept – the word “coffee” mixed in with his father’s name, Colin – and, using Griso’s award-winning 19-91 La Storica blend, he set up his first espresso bar in Sai Ying Pun in 2018. Its popularity led to a second location, in Wan Chai, followed by a third, in 2021 in a former shophouse in Happy Valley. Hot on the heels of launching a fourth site, in Fortress Hill, last January, Sam unveiled his newest space, in LHT Tower, Central, three months ago. This latest location presented a challenge – how to integrate the project into what is effectively part of a modern lift lobby and give it a slice of retro Milan. Sam enlisted JJ Acuna of Bespoke Studio, a natural choice given their successful collaborations on Coffeelin’s other locations.

“For me, design is an energetic, alchemical exchange with a space – a way to craft that space to upgrade a user’s experience,” says Acuna, who specialises in high-end hospitality projects.

Each of Acuna’s designs tells a story, and the narrative behind Coffeelin’s Happy Valley location centres on a young Italian man bringing treasured memories from Milan to life in Hong Kong. The more feminine Fortress Hill location pays homage to his grandmother’s kitchen, while the concept behind the 300 sq ft Central venue evokes his uncle’s trattoria, with rustic terracotta tiles and 1950s-style fabrics. “We wanted to evoke the ambience of a Milanese bar without making it a carbon copy and achieved this through the juxtaposition of colours, textures and patterns,” says Acuna. (As soon as the licence is in place, the venue is hoping to become a coffee-to-cocktails destination.)

Envisaging a more expansive, welcoming environment than the original enclosed white space, Acuna and Sam opened everything up and infused it with bespoke design elements such as lighting, which would sit equally well in an elegant home. They framed the entrance with a faux wood arch and heavy curtains and got permission from their landlord to extend the coffee shop’s footprint and branding into the lobby. They repositioned the bar counter to catch the attention of lift passengers and adorned a structural column with a hand-painted mirror by local artist Katol Lo on one side and a wavy green dresser on another, to discreetly obstruct views of the lift lobby from seated patrons. The pièce de résistance is a mural by French artist Elsa Jeandedieu that graces the wall facing the bar counter and flows across the ceiling in the public area.