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The café’s aesthetic shapes the cityscape as it moves forward. Once a blue corner-house beside the Chiayi City Lumber Mill, it relocated at the end of 2021 into the neighboring ironworks. Together with the Hakuhu design team, the owners preserved and deconstructed the old elements, then rebuilt them with a new aesthetic. Modular thinking was abandoned; natural raw materials, designer furniture, and artistic painted wall reliefs were introduced, staging a dialogue between old and new industrial styles across eras and creating a fresh Chiayi coffee-street scene. When people think of Chiayi’s old buildings, they usually picture hinoki houses; now, for the first time, a coffee shop of such monumental scale occupies an ironworks. “Forward Coffee Roastery 2.0” drew instant attention from the day it opened. Owner Mario says that when he returned to Chiayi to start a business in 2016, he realized cafés are vital to a city’s streetscape, so aesthetics matter. With the chance to plan a second branch, he valued this aspect even more. The original intention in occupying this ironworks, abandoned for nearly thirty years, was to use it for roasting, classes, and exhibitions, but the pandemic prompted merging the café into the space. What hasn’t changed is that Forward Coffee 2.0 still insists on “coffee and sweets only.” Image source: Chiayi City Government Tourism and News Department | Photography: Margot