Located just a block east of the historic New York Public Library at Bryant Park, the new D’Espresso coffee bar takes the comforting library environment and flips it on its side. Anurag Nema and his design team at nemaworkshop created tiles printed with sepia-toned photographs of bookshelves from a NYC bookshop to line the floor, wall and ceiling.

The back wall is covered in herringbone-patterned dark oak flooring. And globe lighting juts out horizontally from backlit glass panels that look like skylights. It all lends the coffeeshop a slightly hallucinatory ambiance.

D’Espresso, at 317 Madison Avenue, is the second store of a projected 10-shop chain. The owner, Eugene Kagansky says that he plans for the next coffee bar to be “upside down”.