A month or so back, on my regular school run to Arch Hill, a cafe suddenly appeared in the loading dock of a 1960s building one street back from the car yards of Great North Road.

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It basks in sunlight in the mornings; there’s a long steel bench with perforated screening, and a wooden bench and some stools where you can sit with a coffee. At first, it was quiet. A few weeks later, it was busy every time I went past.

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It’s called Maeve, and it’s the second cafe of boutique roaster Maeve, whose main site is on Anzac Avenue in the city. The space is owned by industrial designer Clark Bardsley – he operates his design studio and a shared space next door, but he only recently bought the space adjacent to Maeve.

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“It’s right at the end of Putiki Street,” he says of the location: gallery Two Rooms is nearby, and Public Record just moved in down the road. “This really cool alley – it’s kind of like a little arts district uninstalled into an industrial district.” Bardsley used to bike down Putiki Street on the way to work, looking at the closed roller door basking in sunlight. “And I used to think – what a waste!”

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He approached Ewan Kim, the owner of Maeve, who was enthusiastic, so Bardsley and his team whipped up a concept in ChatGPT. “Two months later, we had an operating cafe next door,” he says. The roller door went up and it did just suddenly appear.

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Bardsley and a mate moved the wooden stairs in the space; the bar is made from perforated steel, cut and folded, with off-the-shelf stainless-steel benches. “It was deliberately lo-fi,” says Bardsley, “designed to be put together by hand like a mountable setup – and then you could take it away in a day.”

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Why a cafe? “It’s that community-building thing,” he says. “I can’t run a cafe, but I can create the conditions for one. I just wanted to make a place that people would like to be in.”

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Maeve on Kirk

9 Kirk Street, Arch Hill, Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland

@maeveonanzacandkirk

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