Interiors · Dubai
Reading time: 6 minMost cafés push the counter to one side and give the floor to the tables. For Brew Café’s second Dubai home, H2R Design did the opposite. It put the coffee counter in the dead centre of the room and built everything else around it. The result looks effortless, which is the hardest thing of all to achieve.
Walk into most cafés and the counter sits off to one side, a place to order before you get on with the real business of sitting down. Walk into the new Brew Café in Mirdif Avenue Mall and the counter is the first thing you meet, because it is standing in the middle of the room.
That single decision is the whole design. For Brew’s second Dubai branch — after the original in Jumeirah — the London and Dubai studio H2R Design moved the coffee counter from the side, where it had originally been planned, to the centre, and in doing so changed what the café is about. The counter is no longer a transaction point. It is the stage. Everything in the room now orbits the act of making coffee, which is exactly as it should be in a place whose entire reason for existing is the cup in your hand.
It is a small move with a big effect, and it is a good example of why the best interior design is often a matter of one clear idea rather than a hundred decorative ones.
H2R, and the second Brew
The studio behind it is worth knowing, because this is a practice with a real and growing voice in the region.
H2R Design was founded by the brothers Hasan and Husain Roomi, born in the UK with a Middle Eastern background, and it now works from both London and Dubai across interiors and branding. If the name feels familiar from these pages, that is because H2R has become one of the most prolific and thoughtful hospitality studios in the Gulf, behind Brau, Nette, Affogato and more. The brothers have a recognisable instinct: warm, material-led, quietly restrained, and far more interested in how a space feels than in how loudly it announces itself.
Brew Café is a relationship rather than a one-off. H2R designed the brand’s first Dubai home on Jumeirah Road, and the Mirdif branch is not a copy of it. Where Jumeirah took its cues from the coast, Mirdif goes inland and downward, to something earthier and more grounded. This is the same brand, matured. The studio has taken what it learned the first time and deepened it.
Coffee, translated into materials
The palette is the clearest expression of the idea, and it comes straight from the drink.
H2R has built the room out of the colours and textures of coffee itself: terracotta, the warm red-brown of freshly ground beans, alongside muted neutrals and a soft, subdued green. Terracotta bricks, Venetian-inspired glass blocks and hand-applied textured paints layer up into a backdrop that feels grounded and handmade rather than slick. Nothing shouts. The materials collaborate instead of competing, and the effect is warmth you feel before you can name its source.
Pockets of greenery are threaded through the space to soften the geometry, placed with real discipline so they never tip into jungle. And the lighting does quiet, essential work. Rather than spotlighting the room, H2R has used a warm, low scheme that seems to glow from within the space itself, settling into corners and wrapping around the tables. It is the difference between a café that is lit and a café that feels lit, and it is the reason a room like this makes you want to stay.
Against all that softness, one deliberate note of contrast: black tables, finished by a specialised electroplating technique that is intentionally difficult to replicate. It is a very H2R touch, luxury expressed not through gloss or gold but through a finish most people will never consciously notice, and no one else can easily copy. Satin-finished steel runs from the bar to the lighting tracks, catching the light gently rather than flashing it back.
The counter as theatre
Return, though, to the centre of the room, because that is where the design makes its case.
The coffee counter is monolithic, wrapped in a single material and stripped of visual clutter, so that nothing distracts from what happens on it. And what happens on it is a performance. With the counter in the middle, customers can watch the whole choreography of coffee-making: the equipment, the grind, the pour, the daily ritual raised gently into theatre. Even the fridge display has been folded into the counter’s geometry so cleanly that it never breaks the line. The purity is the point. A single, calm object at the heart of the room, doing the one thing the café is there to do.
This is where H2R’s discipline shows. It would have been easy to dress the counter, to add and embellish. Instead the studio subtracted until only the essential remained, and trusted the act of making coffee to hold your attention. It does.
The hidden work behind the simplicity
Here is the part worth admiring most, and it is the part you are not meant to see.
A room this calm looks effortless, and effortless is the single hardest quality to build. The evidence is in the details that hide their own difficulty. A five-metre-tall pivot door, seemingly seamless, required complex engineering and precise installation to swing quietly and smoothly. The glass bricks were sourced from Australia and custom-fitted into the structure with as little supporting framework as possible, so that their soft, translucent glow reads as pure surface rather than assembly. The electroplated tables, the integrated fridge, the satin steel: every one of these is a small act of engineering disguised as a simple choice.
That is the real story of Brew Café Mirdif. What looks like simplicity is in fact the product of enormous, invisible effort, and the achievement is that none of it shows. Restraint of this kind is not the absence of design. It is design working hard enough to disappear.
A room for Mirdif
None of this would matter if the café felt cold, and it is to H2R’s credit that it does not.
For all its careful detailing, Brew Café never becomes precious or formal. It stays casual and welcoming, a place to meet, work, read or linger over a long conversation. That matters especially in Mirdif, a genuine neighbourhood district where a sense of community carries real weight. H2R clearly understands the social role these everyday spaces play, and the design is not a backdrop to that life but an active part of it. The warmth is not only in the terracotta. It is in the invitation to stay.
Frequently asked questions
Where is Brew Café Mirdif? In Mirdif Avenue Mall, Dubai. It is the second Dubai branch of Brew Café, following the brand’s first location on Jumeirah Road.
Who designed it? H2R Design, the London and Dubai studio founded by brothers Hasan and Husain Roomi, known for warm, material-led hospitality interiors across the region.
What is the central idea? Moving the coffee counter from the side to the centre of the room, so that the act of making coffee becomes the space’s focal point and quiet theatre.
What materials define the interior? Terracotta bricks, Venetian-inspired glass blocks, textured paints, satin-finished steel, greenery, and black tables finished with a specialised electroplating technique, all in an earthy, coffee-inspired palette.
What are the standout details? A seamless five-metre pivot door and translucent glass bricks custom-sourced from Australia, both engineered to look effortless.
Final thoughts
Brew Café Mirdif is a small project with a clear head. It knows what it is about, coffee, and it builds everything around that, most literally by placing the counter at the heart of the room and letting the ritual of the pour become the main event.
What lingers, though, is the quiet confidence of it. H2R Design has made a room that feels warm, grounded and completely at ease, and has hidden inside that ease a great deal of difficult, precise work. The brothers Roomi understand something that takes most designers years to learn: that the highest form of luxury is not more, but exactly enough, executed so well that it looks like it was never hard at all. Long after the last cup is poured, that is the impression that stays.
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