The name might sound familiar, but the concept became a lot more complex this autumn. The former webshop turned into a small real store, which then became a cozy café decorated with vinyl clocks and wooden design items. Vinyl & Wood moved a bit further up on Wesselényi Street, to building no. 23, at a location that very much needed a laid-back locale where we can chill out with our laptops, or enjoy a cup of fine coffee amid carefully picked electronic tunes instead of regular radio channels.
It all started with a photograph – the three founders of Vinyl & Wood saw a picture of a clock made out of a vinyl record, and this ingenious idea piqued their interest and encouraged them to bring the so-called discoclocks to Budapest from Italy. They gathered some more cool accessories and launched a webshop offering a selection of Hungarian and international products that suited their liking. Vinyl & Wood’s webshop was a great success, so much that they opened a small store near the Grand Boulevard not long afterwards, featuring wooden wallets, special jewelry, and, of course, the indispensable vinyl clocks. It soon turned out that they outgrew this spot as well, and wished to shake up their business with something special.
As a next step, Balázs, Dani, and Tomi supplemented the stylish design store with tasty coffees, and with this move, they made it onto our imaginary Budapest map on which we mark fusion places, such as a book swap-café, the flowershop-breakfast spot, and the wine bar-beauty shop. Thus, Vinyl & Wood now also features coffee; not specialty, but Italian dark-roasted Manetti. They cooperated with a barista to create the various coffee concoctions, and as they say, their coffee is not a specialty, but is made with just as much expertise and precision. This is good news to those who prefer more classic coffee tastes, and instead of cascara, just want to sip on a nice cup of cappuccino with breakfast. Naturally, we can also have a snack with our black, as they offer sandwiches, cakes, and the products of Juicy, which we can devour while sitting by the window sill, or upstairs as well. We really love the window sill, as there are not many cafés on Wesselényi Street where we can do discreet people-watching, or enjoy a latte and a newspaper while bathed in natural light.
The products were all carefully selected to fit the basic concept, and even though they feature numerous works of Hungarian designers – such as Karmacsi, NAB, and NAIICA – they like to fill their shop with high-quality, trendy, and somewhat special accessories and objects, regardless of their origin. So, they not only offer Hungarian products, and this is proven by the wooden clocks of WeeWood, and the cool sunglasses of Spitfire.
Recycling and upcycling are both primary principles here, so they aim to introduce more and more such items to Vinyl & Wood’s collection. This is all enhanced with electronic music, as the guys tuned the audio experience to their taste: instead of regular radio channels, they play sophisticated beats as background music for sipping the Italian coffees.
On the whole, if you’re ever nearby, you can savor a cup of tasty coffee outside the shop while sitting on the pillows on the window sill to admire the hustle and bustle of Budapest, or upstairs amid a the calm and soothing atmosphere. Vinyl & Wood is a nice niche-filling place among the countless cheap pubs of Wesselényi Street.
