New York’s Coolest Cafe: 11 Design Lessons from Dae in Brooklyn

When you have been to peek via the Instagram messages between Julie and myself, you’d discover that largely, currently, we’ve been sending one another posts from @daenewyork: a bow-bedecked pillow, teeny tiny pats of butter within the form of fish, a gleaming stainless-steel counter.

Dae is a restaurant, design store, and occasion house on Smith Avenue in Brooklyn, the work of Carol Music and Suea Cho, who first met working as patrons at Opening Ceremony. We talked to Carol by cellphone: “We wish to create our entire lives,” she says. “We’ve all the time been obsessive about Korean cafes, and so they’re all the time ever altering, they’re all the time stunning, and we knew that that was lacking right here.”

The duo appeared for simply the suitable spot: “We all the time knew we wished to do it in Brooklyn. I all the time wished an area that wasn’t closely foot trafficked by vacationers; I simply wished it to be extra peaceable. Our dream was all the time to be three doorways down from a nook, however this was the closest to it”—it’s a nook house—”and we fell in love just about instantly.” Then got here a yr of reworking the completely clean house into a contemporary and vibrant cafe, enlisting pals from the set design crew at JCrew and quite a lot of Korean makers, and infrequently doing battle with the Metropolis over the permits required to show an actual property company right into a functioning restaurant.

The result’s an area that’s deliberately easy in its parts—a stainless-steel bar, blocky wooden furnishings—however with pleasant, ever-changing particulars: plates stamped DAE, silverware sourced from inns, a rotating array of handmade wares within the store part. “Individuals are available and say, ‘That is so contemporary,’ however actually it’s very a lot a Korean café,” Carol says.

Dae has solely been open for 3 months, however Tiktokers and Instagrammers wasted no time discovering it—and staged so many full-on photoshoots that taking photographs inside has been (largely) banned. Fortuitously, Carol and Suea shared all the small print with us. Right here’s a glance inside, with classes from just some of Dae’s genius design moments.

Pictures courtesy of Dae New York.

1. Choose a timeless palette.