I noticed the floor before the coffee. At a corner café on Sokolovská in Karlín, the tiles formed a diamond pattern Josef Gočár might have sketched in 1912 — poured last spring by a Smíchov ceramics studio. The lever machine hissed in the corner as though it had always been part of the room.
Tiles Before Lattes
This is the quiet thesis of Prague's new-wave cafés: the room matters as much as the roast. Here, Cubist architecture is lived vernacular — and these spaces draw from a grammar predating the third wave by a century.
The floor tiles are not decoration. They are the argument — that a café is first a room, and only second a menu.