Desert Kid Coffee

Before the coffee, this address was Musicians Outlet, the music school where one of the founders took his first guitar lesson, and the shop now records Desert Sounds, its own live-recorded concert series, from the cafe floor. Most people who find their way back into the building that taught them to play settle for hanging a plaque.

Everything is roasted in the building on an IMF RM15, an air roaster the shop says is the only one running locally, behind a glass wall in view of the cafe, and the pour-overs come off a Modbar Pour-Over 2.0 on a slow bar of its own. Green arrives through the importers Royal Coffee and Red Fox Coffee Merchants, with one recent direct lot from the Guatemalan company Panorama Coffees, though the four standing retail bags are blends that name a growing region at most, with no farm, varietal or process on any of them.

New York studio The Working Assembly authored the identity and the environmental design, and Las Vegas firm Coffee Heroes Solutions spent more than two years with the founders on the plan and the build: floor-to-ceiling windows down two walls, millwork stained to echo the regional palms, dark counters flecked like sand, and a garage door that rolls the couch-lined lounge open onto the patio. Photographs of the two of them as kids hang beside the brand's Cabazon dinosaurs and hummingbirds, so 5,400 square feet authored by two outside firms still reads like a family album with a bar in it.