The idea behind The Bloom Room’s flowery aesthetic blossomed from Co-owners Giorgina Venzin and Chris Hollingsworth sitting down with a piece of paper, a pen, and a bit of inspiration from Pinterest and European café design.
“Everywhere you look there’s flowers,” Chris says. “We covered the ceiling with wisterias and set up a floral wall.
“We’d noticed at a few pop-up cafés that flower walls were popular for Instagram shots. Social media is so powerful when it comes to marketing these days. We thought, ‘why not create a flower wall where people can come in, get great food, great coffee, and get that photo?’”
Chris fitted out the café himself. He and Giorgina drew inspiration from cafés and restaurants such as the Dalloway Terrace in London, which incorporates foliage into its design.
“We went with a different style to what we normally do. Usually our cafés are Asian inspired, but we wanted to go with something a bit more European,” Chris says. “We took ideas from here and there and made them our own.”
The Bloom Room serves Veneziano Coffee, and Chris appreciates the service and onsite training as much as the beans.
“[Veneziano’s] training facilities stand out to us as well above the rest. They’re constantly taking our baristas, levelling them up, and running the courses for us,” he says.
The café runs Veneziano’s Forza blend for its milk-based drinks and Bella blend for black coffee.
Chris calls Forza a robust dark blend that’s good for an early morning kick, while Bella’s lighter, fruitier notes makes black coffee accessible to the wider community.
The Bloom Room prepares its two blends with a two-group La Marzocco espresso machine.
“We were pretty limited for space when designing the café so I had to sacrifice that third group head for a second grinder so we could run two blends,” Chris says.
The Bloom Room’s menu takes inspiration from traditional European and British dishes, highlighting bangers and mash, bubble and squeak, and sticky date waffles among others.
The Bloom Room opened in August 2018 to a positive response from the local community.
“A lot of people asked ‘why Birkdale?’” Chris says. “We feel that the outer suburbs need something like this. Both Giorgina and I are from around here, so we wanted to create a little café that is different to the norm.”
Chris says the highlight of opening The Bloom Room is seeing peoples’ excited reactions when they walk in and see the decorated space, and engaging with them about coffee.
“I love serving great coffee to passionate people,” Chris says. “You can’t beat serving great coffee and great food to people. It’s such a rewarding feeling.”
The Bloom Room
2/190 Birkdale Rd, Birkdale, Queensland, 4159
Open Monday to Sunday 7am to 2pm
(07) 3822 9336