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Coffee devotion nowadays resembles emergent Christianity in its fervour and its unfolding heresies. Roast practitioners break away from their established
cafe congregations to establish smaller sectarian places of worship - in pursuit of an ideal or driven by a personal coffee conviction. Serious baristas follow. Often a Reformation process is undergone. Soy lattes are banished in some pure thinking establishments.
De-Caf and Skinny-Caf are likewise spurned.
Heaney is the head coffee roaster and barista at this new venture located in the shadows of RMIT. Word has it that Heaney is a master of the craft and possessed of a modern purist coffee aestheticism. There is none of your Romish decadence to be found in elaborate continental espresso machines here. No gold plated Excelsior or Faema. No finned and streamlined
Cadillac-red La Pavoni. Instead, the clean Protestant lines of a Synesso sits devoutly on a messmate bench that is of Amish simplicity.
In the front bar area, wide Recycled Messmate floorboards replace original gapped and worn softwood timbers that have outlived their
purpose; Reclaimed Tasmanian Oak flooring and Recycled Brushbox screens define the alcoves. At the rear, one whole wall is an interlocked montage of dressed
Recycled Messmate 40mm framing timbers showing
end-grain and side-grain in alternating brick-bond courses. It is a textural relief to the weight of redbrick and bluestone that would have dominated the rear courtyard. Besides
- it is remarkable in its own right as a bijou byte of grain and dimension repeated continually on a very large canvas
- with no single part of the pattern ever identical to another. The overall scale and effect is impressive and should provide inspiration for this practice in residential timber work.
To a point my CBD tour was inspired by Urban Salvage-sourced timbers - but I feel impelled to mention a bookshop in Little Lonsdale Street
- discovered while looking for 'A Little Bird' in all the wrong places. Embiggen Books declare on their business card that
'The Bookshop is Dead. Long Live the Bookshop'. Spirited irony reminding us that what is true of national trends and Big Business
- isn't true for all small enterprises. Embiggen Books
survives happily behind the State Library in a long concrete
vault-like room at the rear of QVB that is relieved by bookshelves and benches formed in
- you guessed it - lovely old timber. I'm coming back, Embiggen.
The timber is oxidised, aged and hypnotising in caramel tones and grain. The black marks of time
and fine surface furrowing add to the appeal of this timber salvaged from an I can think of lots of
purposes to put this to - but there is only so much of it.
Recycled Messmate for
joinery, furniture and benchtops - just like the benches at 'A Little Birdie
Told Me'
Clear grained boards remilled from a gymnasium floorboard are still available in set-length packs from our Spotswood showroom. Best suited to screening installations like the bar booths at 'Captain Melville'. But have a look at our
Tallowwood 42 x 19mm ($4.50/m) and Blackbutt screening battens 40 x 32mm
($4.90/m) as well.
You can opt for a
houselot salvaged from a 1930s dwelling with many boards still
room-length Alternatively, you can
choose a board that has had a hard life on the surface of it's 19mm depth and shows marks, scratches In an age
where everyone is looking for authenticity, this supply of genuine metropolitan salvage has verity in large measure.
If we hadn't left
the butt tenons on these short timbers, no-one would have believed they
were recycled I love Forest Red Gum. I don't like that everyone calls it Queensland Red Gum and Queenslanders call it Blue Gum. Forest Red Gum evokes that tall forest, high canopy
formation where the species is found. These lengths - 1.5m and 2.1m - will suit table legs for furniture. I hope someone can use the retained tenon creatively. They are air-seasoned from 100
years under sheets of iron in the
Available in 2.2m to 2.3m lengths and salvaged from the deadman beams on the timber loading dock at Port Curtis Dairy Co-operative. Milled from 100mm thick timbers, they have been re-seasoned and dressed retaining two boltholes on each end.
Lovely rustic finish and depth of colour.
Most of our stock
of Blackbutt in this size comes from house framing.
Not expensive - but
a useful size for small tables and joinery projects.
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