Backyard Coffee and Jazz in Kyoto

It doesn't feel run down because it isn't run down. No dust in the corners, no dents in the wall - this is the difference between patina and "old crap": a lifetime of care.

Thought similarly. It looks very clean, is well lit, the decisions look purposeful (no random crap on the shelves), and the materials wear well (wood vs e.g. cheap plastic chairs).

This is a really excellent observation. In addition:

> It’s such a curious, almost uncanny, feeling to enter one of these places. The inside feels much bigger and grander than the outside.

It makes sense for people to have an innate desire to be in places that are, you know, good for people to be in. The most obvious way to tell if a place is good for you is if it carries evidence that it has historically been good to other people.

Maybe we have some subsconcious processing that picks up on signs of human activity. That means wear and tear, built things, modifications. The way humans leave their mark on an environment when they spent time on it. All of that spent time is like accumulated votes that "yup, this is a good human place."

At the same time, we don't want to find ourselves hanging out in a dumping ground, slag heap, or other environment that humans have left their mark in by expoiting it. That's not a good place to be, because it's not just used, it's used up. So what we want to look for is not just signs of human activity (which a landfill has in spades), but a certain kind of caring activity. Marks in the space that seem to have been done to leave it more appealing to be in.

I think that's what the author is picking up on here. These tiny, aged spaces have a deep accumulation of caring attention. They feel bigger than they are because we pick up on that huge information density of all of the past people that have left their mark on a place. The place isn't large spatially, but it's large in time.

It's the exact opposite of how walking into a giant mall or corporate office can still feel claustrophobic because there's nothing—no things—there, no sense of history or connection to any lived experience.

It's also large in usability. That's hard to do with a small space; you have to think different. To think like that, you first need to live in a small space, and organically develop solutions around it.

Now, you could do that with any space, like a machine shop. But the "good human place"-ness of the shop will depend on the forces that shape that shop. If all the forces are purely commercial, you're going to end up with something that works commercially, but might not be so human-friendly. I think the disconnect between bland American commercial spaces and more intimate Japanese ones is the relationship of the owner-proprietor to commercialism.

In the US, I have been in a few cafes where I had to step back outside to check if I had accidentally walked into someone's living room. Same for hostels; the best ones feel like you're in someone's home. Their layout was not driven by commercial interest, but by a person just wanting to feel cozy. The space is them.

Whereas a Starbucks isn't a person, it's a chemical factory. If the music is too loud, it doesn't matter if I complain; the factory workers (supposedly) can't control the music. If the air is too cold, it doesn't matter if I'm shivering; the factory workers are paid to make coffee, not care about my discomfort. Our human connection to the space is irrelevant to the manufacturing and selling of chemical stimulants.

> this obviously aging little structure doesn’t feel ugly or rundown.

That made me cringe a bit. The whole look of the place is deliberate. I mean, somebody put in a lot of effort to make it look just that way. Notice how every inch of it is spotless and nothing could be said to be out of place.

> I think the disconnect between bland American commercial spaces and more intimate Japanese ones is the relationship of the owner-proprietor to commercialism.

Much of this is building codes. There are simply many things you can't do in an American business even if you want to, and not for bad reasons either, but eg electric, fire safety, ADA, employee safety rules are totally different than Japan and force you to have much larger and plainer spaces.

The big one that kills everything is parking minimums.

Agreed. And this, too:

>And the coffee was pretty good, too.

it feels a little mean to describe this as cringe, it's just an honest opinion from someone who feels differently from you

i wouldn't describe it as deliberate, but rather accepted and embraced. yes they're choosing to not update it and modernize and they like they way it looks, but its not like they took a clean modern space and deliberately aged it to look this way

> I’m not sure why it is that this obviously aging little structure doesn’t feel ugly or rundown.

as an aside, i feel it doesnt look ugly and rundown because it's largely natural materials and colors. it's normal for things in nature to look this way.