House Notes
Intervening spaces: from La Tallera to Casa Gaia
There's a phrase we've used from the beginning that remains the best description of what we do: we intervene spaces that are missing good coffee. We don't open branches; we enter places that already have a story and add ours to it, careful not to step on the one that was there first.
Every location, a film
Gramo was founded by one person who came from film and another who came from graphic design, and that defined the method: every location is conceived like a film. There's a set — the space and what already lived in it —, there are props — the bar, the cups, the objects that inhabit it — and there's a soundtrack, because a place is also something you hear. When all three are in position, the café stops being a counter and becomes a scene.
The method
Set, props, soundtrack
First we listen to the place: what it was, what it is, what it's missing. Then we decide what part coffee plays there. The bar never arrives to impose; it arrives to complete.
From the garage to the museums
The first film was a modest one: a bar in a Cuernavaca garage, at the height of the pandemic, next to Pacífica Panadería on Tulipán 302. Out of it came the first Gramo, which today lives on in garden form in Jardines las Delicias.
The next scenes raised the stakes. Gramo 2 set up beside La Tallera, the former home and studio of David Alfaro Siqueiros, now a museum: coffee in the shadow of one of the great muralists. Gramo 3 moved into Museo Casa Gaia, the former home of Cantinflas in central Cuernavaca, where the pool holds a Diego Rivera mural and the galleries keep works by Tamayo and Toledo; there the bar pours wine too and, some nights, live jazz. Gramo 4 opened at the Teopanzolco Cultural Centre, the archaeological zone right alongside — few cups are drunk with a view of a pyramid.
The city as second act
In Mexico City the script stayed the same: find places with a life of their own. Gramo 5 is a bar inside the Gandhi bookstore on Paseo de las Palmas — books and coffee, the most natural co-production in the world. Gramo 6, the newest, shares its Polanco space with Laguna Cipryen, a fragrance boutique: aroma on one side of the aisle, aroma on the other. And the 2GO kiosks, in Cuernavaca and in Bosques, are the road-movie version: the same film, in short form.
We don't open branches; we shoot on location.
Team Gramo
What doesn't change
The set changes, the props change, the soundtrack changes. What doesn't change is what gets served: the same coffee, treated with the same care, in the garden, in the museum, at the kiosk. That's the house rule — the only one that isn't negotiable on any location.
If you haven't seen every scene yet, the map is open: eight locations between Cuernavaca and Mexico City, each running its own show.
