Café Pacifica is based in the foyer of the American Express building at 12 Shelley Street, Sydney. The previous tenant of the site had been evicted and the whole space had been completely demolished. We had the responsibility of transforming the whole space into a brand-new Café that reflected the style of the building and the American Express brand.
The fitout commenced just prior to Christmas 2018, which always creates challenges for the timeline with Christmas shutdown periods. During this time however the building also changed owners on December 29th, 2018 which really threw some spanners into the works. With completely new sign in and onsite EHS systems that came with the new building managers the whole process was complicated with many works now having to be done at night and a lot of time lost with inductions and onerous onsite paperwork. On top of the fact that the original Café design was average at best and that the new building managers did not know or understand the workings of the building we had some serious challenges on this project with the building changeover.
The building changeover caused a number of delays in the project which were challenging as we are always meticulous with completing projects on time, however on this project it was impossible to finish when we anticipated. As we neared the end of the project and the many facets of the project came together we could finally see the transformation of the space and the efforts of our hard work. The final outcome was an incredibly stylish inner-city Café with beautiful timber veneer joinery, Caesarstone tops, custom made displays and black writable laminate panelling. The kitchen was tight for space but in the end we were able to do the best you could possibly do in the tight space we had to work with, and it was clean and professional. This was really a very testing project, but the final outcome looked amazing.
