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Last week in Paris, we went to check out the above café called The Coffee. It was our first time. The brand is a Brazilian coffee chain founded in 2017 by three brothers who wanted to combine Japanese minimalism with the best of Brazilian coffee. Brazil, by the way, is the world's largest producer of coffee.
Since then, they've gone on to open nearly 300 stores around the world — from Rio de Janeiro to Paris and Seoul to Sydney. Earlier this year, they opened their first locations in Toronto: on King Street West, in the Financial District, and in Yorkville. And today, I'm excited to share that their next location will be at the base of Junction House.
This feels like a perfect fit for the area and the building. One of the things that we tried to do with the design of the project was blend Canadian minimalism with the rich history of the Junction. So I'm happy to see this brand land here, especially since we (the developer) no longer own the retail component and weren't involved in the leasing. Kudos to Lee Chow Group (the owner) and the JLL Retail Group.
It’s exciting to see a global brand like The Coffee choose the Junction. They clearly know what's up. I'm now looking forward to becoming a loyal customer.
If you'd like to follow them on Instagram, here's their Canadian account.
Elevate Miami, which I wrote about last month, just announced a number of new speakers and, more specifically, a number of new high-rise development projects that will be discussed at the conference. They are (not an exhaustive list):
Dolce & Gabbana Residences, Miami
Mercedes-Benz Places, Miami
Aman and One High Line Residences, New York
Indian Creek Residences & Yacht Club, Miami Beach
Edition Residences, Miami
AGE360, Curitiba, Brazil
What should be clear from this list is that Miami is like a different planet. It is one of the places where the richest people in the world go to spend their money, much of it on real estate. Because of this, you can think of this real estate as a luxury good, which is why so many of them are now branded.
In economic terms, a luxury good is typically defined as a good where demand increases -- more than what is proportional -- as incomes rise. For example, if a person's income goes up by 1%, but their demand for a particular thing goes up by 5%, then this thing would be considered a "luxury good," as opposed to a "normal good."
The technical definition is an income elasticity of demand that is greater than 1. More simply, this just means that as someone starts making more money, they will start spending a greater percentage of their income on luxury goods. This is in contrast to "necessity goods," where it doesn't matter how much money you make, you only need so much toilet paper, for example.
What all of this suggests is that as people from all over the world get rich, they are likely to want more branded residences in a place like Miami. However, the flip side of this dynamic is that as incomes fall, the demand for luxury goods should, in theory, also fall more than what is proportional. It works both ways.
So I'll be curious to hear -- from the developers at Elevate -- how things are going right now. We're at a time in the real estate cycle where everyone is rethinking their strategies. Or maybe, Miami truly is a different planet.
I like and agree with this tweet: "You can have bad urbanism with good architecture, and good urbanism with bad architecture." The two provided examples of this are (1) Brasilia and (2) what appears to be some random little street in Japan.
Brasilia is the capital of Brazil. It's a masterplanned city designed by Lúcio Costa, Oscar Niemeyer and Joaquim Cardozo in the 1950s. And it was all part of a plan to move the capital from Rio de Janeiro to a more central location in the middle of the country.
The result is some incredible architecture by Oscar Niemeyer that, for me, is emblematic of the country. Brazil was one of the first countries outside of Europe to adopt modern architecture and it's precisely for this reason that Brasilia is high on my list of places to visit. (Rio is also one of my favorite cities.)
But whenever I tell a Brazilian that I want to visit the city, the usual response is, “Why?” I then have to explain that it’s because of Niemeyer and the architecture, and then they say, “Oh, okay, that makes sense. But besides the architecture, there isn’t much else to see or do there.”
Part of the reason for this could be because the city has objectively bad urbanism. When you look at it in plan view, the layout of the city resembles a plane or bird in flight, and that is, I guess, symbolically cool when you view it on Google Maps. But on the ground, cities are not at their best when they're designed around abstract symbols.
They're at their best when they're designed around people. And this is what example number two does well. The architecture is ugly and nondescript, but the street is narrow, the road is shared, and the buildings contain a mix of fine-grained uses.
It's a dead simple approach, but it works — really well. It's good urbanism.
Cover photo by Thandy Yung on Unsplash
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