Web Feature: Thinking Inside the Box

In the growing specialty coffee scene of Austin, Texas, coffee lovers have enjoyed an influx of high-end roasters and hip cafés. A new kind of coffee experience arrived recently with the opening of La Boîte Café, an environmentally sensitive shop built from an old shipping container. Co-owners Dan Bereczki and Victoria Davies followed their interest in shipping container architecture to create a unique café experience in La Boîte, which opened its doors last November.

Q: How did you get the idea to create a café from a shipping container?
Bereczki: The big message of our café is you don’t need to buy everything new and throw it away. One of our longer-term goals is to find some land and put a house on it, and one of the ideas is to do a shipping container house. There’s some really interesting things being done with that architecturally. So when we decided to do the café, we thought, why don’t we combine those two ideas? Because opening up a mobile food vending operation in Austin is significantly easier than doing a storefront, and actually to do a storefront with a shipping container would have been very, very difficult—next to impossible—with building codes and fanning rules.
Davies: In the last nine months, the mobile food vendor scene has taken off in Austin. The majority of people are using Airstream trailers, and we looked at those as a possibility, but we really wanted something that was a little bit more substantial than an Airstream. We wanted to have more of a presence.

Q: How’d you decide where to put the container?
Davies: It’s on a large lawn in front of a small business park in south Austin, which is where the majority of the mobile food vendors are popping up. We came across the location and loved it, more than anything because we wanted an interesting outdoor feel, and this space really provided that.

Q: What went into turning it into a café? 
Davies: We didn’t necessarily want it to look like a building, but we didn’t want it to look like a trailer either. We worked with the city and found out that realistically the only way we could do this in a container without it being treated like a building was to put it on wheels. So we bought the container and had it put on an axel by a local company here. We had to get a title and a VIN number and all that. And as we did that we also got involved in the construction process of making the café, which involved a whole lot of welding.

Q: Does it feel like a shipping container when you’re in there?
Bereczki: It still has a pretty strong presence as being a shipping container. The side that we cut open, we put it on a rail, and it rolls open like a barn door. And when we roll it shut it looks like you have a nicely painted and well-landscaped shipping container.
Davies: It’s definitely very clear that it was a shipping container. The reason that we call it the box is that as we started the construction, that’s kind of how we consistently referred to it. And rather than kind of over-think anything, we just used the French word for “box” as a title because we knew a large part of our focus was going to be French style, with croissants and other baked goods.

Q: And you built this with the environment in mind also?
Davies: During the build-out we tried to use the most environmentally sensitive products we could. We used soy-based insulation, and our walls and floors are Marmoleum, which is the only natural linoleum you can get. We tried to keep it as low impact as possible. And that goes all the way through to the products that we’re selling. We’re at all costs avoiding selling anything that’s been imported from too far away. We do get some products from Mexico because it’s right next door to where we are, and Mexico’s the closest place we can get coffee from. But what we’re really trying to do is keep our carbon footprint as low as possible.
Bereczki: Everything that we serve on is either recycled products or is compostable. The plastic cups we have are corn-based and biodegradable. And all of the equipment in the shop has been in other shops, purchased through Craigslist and eBay. It’s all about reusing, recycling, and composting where you can.

Questions or comments? E-mail us

Purchase the February 2010 issue (does not include this web-only article)

Back to Top