Peet's Coffee & Tea

Bringing local communities together in coffee shops with a neighborhood feel.

Sometimes the design strategy for a national brand is not to look like a national brand. Peets knows their customers. Put off by the corporate hard-sell and ubiquity of some other national coffee brands, Peets customers are serious coffee aficionados and deeply connected to their local communities. So the assignment to Bergmeyer was clear: make the customer experience all about the product quality, but give each space its own unique and locally-grounded identity. Instead of making every Peets look like it came from a standards manual, the design of each location was adapted to reflect the community which it served. Bergmeyer was free to borrow liberally from the locale and neighborhood for inspiration for each space. On Beacon Hill, one of Boston's most historic ivy-covered neighborhoods, a living wall in the seating area surrounds customers in leafy greenery. Spaces in Boston's North End will use bright tiles and shiny metal laminates to recall nearby historic Italian cafés. For a Chicago location in the historic Wrigley Building, the space will include a coffered ceiling and metal radiator covers modeled after panels found on the building's elevator doors. Over the next few years, Peets will double its locations in Boston and Chicago and continue to expand across the country becoming a friendly, neighborhood coffee shop in dozens of unique locations.