The Laptop Has Landed — The Evolution of Café Cultu

As a person living in the 21st century, I get most of my work done from a little metallic box — one with a screen, some buttons with letters, and a small square sensitive to my touch, letting me move the cursor wherever I need it. This is not something new; it is exactly what we have all been shifting towards. Everyone works on computers now. But what keeps changing is the technology itself. These little metallic boxes become more and more efficient, lighter, and thinner — arguably even slimmer than your finger. And that means one thing above all else: more mobile.

That mobility changes everything. The way we work has quietly but fundamentally transformed and because of the mobility we are not only working from home, but any part of the world. Workers in the modern world are no longer tied to a desk in a fixed location; they can operate from any corner of the globe. Alongside this, we are seeing a large boom of freelancers — a rapidly growing segment of the workforce who are entirely self-employed and location-independent.

The freelance market is going through its own transformation. Following the rise of AI, a whole new category of jobs began emerging — jobs done entirely online, and jobs that are in growing demand. A 2025 study published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization tracked exactly this, finding that AI-complementary skills saw a significant surge. Things like machine learning, programming, and chatbot development — machine learning jobs alone grew by 24%, and chatbot development nearly tripled. The nature of independent, remote work is not shrinking. It is expanding, and it does not look like it is slowing down any time soon. With all of this happening, there is a small but telling observation to be made about the spaces around us — specifically, cafés. What were once places to meet friends, linger over a cappuccino, and have an unhurried conversation have quietly shifted into something closer to co-working spaces. Walk into most cafés during the day and you will not find tables full of people chatting. You will find rows of open laptops, people with headphones in, notebooks spread beside their keyboards. This shift in how people use cafés has had a direct effect on the spaces themselves. Cafés were originally built around one core idea: high customer turnover. Small tables, compact chairs, a layout designed to get people in and back out again.

A clear problem and tension emerges from this. Traditional café furniture was designed for short stays is not suited for long periods of work. This puts cafés in a difficult position: how do they maintain their commercial appeal — high turnover, a healthy average spend — while also offering a workspace that the modern visitor actually wants to come back to? How can the furniture and layout adapt to serve both functions at once?

This research sets out to explore whether and how cafés have changed to meet the needs of the modern visitor, to look at existing solutions already present in the market, and to understand how — and whether — it is possible to combine the café experience with the functionality of a coworking space. More specifically, it will look at how compact workspaces within cafés can help maintain commercial viability while genuinely serving the people who now use them as their primary place of work.

Research plan 

1. WHAT DID CAFES LOOK LIKE BEFORE
2. WHAT DID THE FURNITURE LOOK LIKE AT THAT TIME
3. CAFES TODAY
4. FURNITURE INSIDE THE CAFES TODAY
5. CONCLUSION

It is a little bit hard to trace the beginning of cafés, since they have existed for a long time — it was more of a gradual process. By the seventeenth century they were already quite popular in Europe, and became especially established in the eighteenth century. In England, France, and the Netherlands, coffeehouses evolved into important public spaces, shaping the development of compact, social, and mobile café furniture.

In England they were even called «penny universities,» because for the price of a single penny you could get a coffee and sit among merchants, writers, scholars, and politicians. Over time they also became places for chess, backgammon, auctions, stockbroking, and trade meetings. As for who went — coffeehouses were generally open to a broad range of men from different social classes, though women were largely excluded. The crowd varied by location too; some coffeehouses drew traders, others poets, others political circles. But the common thread was always the same: people came to be around other people, to talk, and to participate.

From the 1830s onward, cafés began to shift. They were still places for conversation and intellectual exchange — especially in cities like Paris and Vienna — but they were slowly becoming something broader. Less tied to news, trade, and political organizing, and more connected to everyday urban life. Reading, leisure, art, people-watching. The café was growing up. The crowd changed too. Where early coffeehouses had largely been the territory of merchants, writers, and politically active men, the later café started drawing in artists, students, bohemians, and a wider educated public. Women and broader social groups began appearing more regularly, though access was still uneven and plenty of cafés remained firmly male-dominated for a long time. By the mid-19th century the café was no longer just a place for debate. It had become a space for all kinds of things — socializing, reading, working, watching the city go by. This is also the period when café culture started showing up in painting and literature as a symbol of modern urban life, which says something about how embedded it had become in the everyday.

The chair was designed by Michael Thonet, a German-born furniture maker who developed his work in Austria. What set him apart was his use of bentwood technology — a process of steaming and bending solid wood into curved shapes — which was genuinely new at the time, and allowed for a lightness and elegance that traditional furniture construction simply could not achieve. But what made the No. 14 truly remarkable was not just how it looked — it was how it was made and transported. The chair was built from only six pieces of wood, ten screws, and two nuts, and it was one of the first pieces of furniture ever designed to be shipped in parts. It could be disassembled, packed flat, and transported across Europe before being assembled at the other end with a simple set of instructions. That logic changed everything, and it is difficult not to draw a line between the No. 14 and the flat-pack thinking that IKEA would later build an entire industry around. At their peak, Thonet’s factories were producing over 865,000 bentwood chairs a year.

And it never really went away. The No. 14 — also known as the coffeehouse chair or bistro chair — can still be found in cafés, restaurants, bookstores, and public interiors all over the world today, including contemporary spaces as far as Guangzhou, China. Le Corbusier once described it as the most elegant and precisely crafted practical object ever created, and British designer Jasper Morrison said it has the freshness of something new, because it has simply never been bettered.

The Thonet No. 14 was not the only chair leaving its mark on café culture at this time. In France, a very different approach to furniture was taking shape — one built not from wood, but from iron.

The François Carré Sunburst chair, also known as the Deauville chair, was designed in Paris in the 1850s and patented in 1866. What made it stand out was its material. While most furniture of the period was still built from wood, Carré worked with bent steel rod and spring construction — a choice that was genuinely unusual at the time and gave the chair a durability that wood simply could not match.

The coffeehouses are what we are going to focus on. Because they are the ones quietly transitioning into something new — slowly becoming the preferred workspace for a growing number of people. And the reason is not hard to understand. With the purchase of a single cup of coffee, you are effectively getting yourself a working environment outside of your home — cheap, accessible, and open to almost everyone. Combine that with the fact that apartments in cities are becoming progressively smaller, and that working from the same room every day quickly becomes suffocating, and you start to understand why so many people grab their laptop and head to the nearest café. A change of scenery keeps things moving. This is where the shift begins. And if we want to understand where it is going, it helps to trace the pattern from the beginning. Early cafés were built for proximity — tables pushed close together, benches shared between strangers, conversation flowing freely across the room. The furniture was arranged to bring people together, reflecting the café's original purpose as a place of debate, exchange, and collective thought. Then, moving into the nineteenth century, something changed. The café became a more personal space — a place for lingering, reading, watching the world go by. And the furniture followed. Large communal tables gave way to smaller individual ones. Heavy benches were replaced by lighter chairs. People began sitting in their own little zones rather than around a shared table. The space became more private, more self-contained.

The answer, it turns out, is yes — at least partially. Ergonomics as a formal design discipline was named in 1950, and through the mid-twentieth century and into the 1970s, its influence on furniture became increasingly visible. Driven by workplace health concerns, growing office-based labor, and research into posture and fatigue, designers began thinking seriously about what it means for a chair to support the body over time — not just for the first few minutes, but across hours of continuous sitting. The designer Bill Stumpf, who dedicated much of his career to this question, put it simply: «A chair should be perceived as comfortable before, during, and after sitting upon it.»

Beyond individual chairs, cafés also began incorporating sofas, armchairs, and low lounge seating. And then there are the sockets. Perhaps the most telling detail of all. Power outlets built into walls at table height, charging ports embedded directly into tabletops, USB sockets tucked into corners. It is a small thing — but it says everything about who the space is being designed for, and how long they are expected to stay.

Walk into enough cafés and you will notice that the shift described above — towards ergonomic seating, power outlets, and longer stays — is not happening everywhere. Not every café has made this shift — and the ones that have, often only did it halfway. A shelf with bar stools along the wall. An armchair in the corner. A socket somewhere, if you look for it. These are gestures, not solutions. The result is a space that does not fully work for either type of visitor.

The starting hypothesis was simple: café furniture should be fully adapted to the needs of long-term users, putting freelancers and remote workers first. It was a clear idea. But the research makes it harder to stand behind. What the evidence actually shows is not one model replacing another, but something in between. The history of café furniture is a story of slow change — from shared benches to individual tables, from heavy fixed chairs to lighter moveable ones, from purely social spaces to spaces that also make room for solitude and work. Every shift happened gradually, following how people were using the space, not ahead of it. The current moment looks a lot like one of those shifts, still in progress.

A working zone here, a social zone there. The initial hypothesis was too absolute. Fully adapting café furniture to long-term users would serve one visitor while losing another — and losing the business case along with it. What the research actually points to is something more considered: café furniture design should balance the needs of both short-stay and long-stay visitors, so that the space works for the person passing through and the one settling in — without sacrificing what makes it